UGLY FOOD GOES TO WASTE. DONT DISCRIMINATE!!!
HI Steemians,
As consumers all across the world, we are constantly being sold and advertised about the various quality produce in supermarkets. Yet, these fabulous fruits and veggies that are so perfect are just about 70% of the produce harvested. The rest of the 30% goes to waste. Why???
Well, it is because of the physical appearance of the produce that don’t fit the company and consumer expectations. These physical imperfections may include, the size, shape, colour, damage and other mutations that may occur in the process of growing these plants. Some fruits like carrots need to be grown in a singular straight form, apples need to be a bright colour, if too pale, they’re thrown away. Bananas depending on the type of banana, needs to be a certain size, if too big, or too small it is thrown away. Also, if they are too straight or too curved, they’re thrown away as well. All these tiny or large imperfections in produce and the consumer expectations for them to be perfect are causing the massive waste in food.
These fruits and vegetables are being thrown away and wasted in fields. It costs about 50c to grow a bunch of lettuce, and because of the weather damaging a few leaves on the exterior, it must be thrown away, even though it would be just like every other lettuce if those particular leaves are removed. This 20-50% of all produce is wasted and farms are not receiving profit for up to half of their hard work waiting months for them to grow.
Only a small portion of these imperfect fruit and veggies in Australia are brought to charities and non-profit organisations like Oz Harvest which delivers the food to people in need. Another tiny portion is brought to supermarkets like Woolworths where they are sold as the “Odd Bunch” for half the price. This may seem like a good thing but to me and many others, by selling these imperfect fruit and veggies at lower prices, it tells consumers that they’re of less quality when realistically, they are of the same good quality, they just look different. If they are continued to be sold at lower prices, this doesn’t allow these foods to be accepted into the market as normal and of high quality. The only reason being is that companies are afraid of losing their reputation as having quality good produce. Hence they may lose their sales.
Overall, delivering ‘going to be wasted' food to needy people and introducing them slowly into the markets is a good first step into changing the tonnes of quality produce dumped every year all over the world. Not just in Australia, especially in the US where 50% of all food is wasted. I think what we need to do as consumers is start to accept these different fruit and vegetables and purchase them whether they be of the a cheaper or the same price as regular flirts and vegetables. After all they’re of the same quality. And are we all not different ourselves?
Thanks for checking in, please feel free to upvote, resteem and leave a comment if you have any opinions that you agree/disagree with or just any new views in general. And, next time you go shopping, remember to try some groceries from the ‘odd bunch’ section.
It sucks how much food is wasted. It kind of ticks me off when people say that the world is overpopulated and we cant feed everyone, that's just not true.
Yeah, we have more than enough food to feed all the people in the world and extra. Food wastage before it meets the shops is about 30%. Then, there is a further wastage when food is thrown away after being bought. We should just purchase what we need and not more, so it allows for more food to be distributed to other parts of the world that are less fortunate.
Eat ugly food! It's ridiculous that we are more concerned with the looks of food than the nutrition. This is our modern world's vanity in action.
Our society is just like that, people care more about the appearance of things rather than the quality. This is not just reflected in the food wastage, it's also in the social behaviours such as discrimination, judging by looks.
Its sad that there are people on one end of the globe that in dire need of food irrespective of the appearance, and in another place the have more than enough to afford to throw away.
It really is depressing to see people giving less value to food which other people don't have but require to stay alive. I think we need to let them be aware that there are people out there that are starving and don't even have a supermarket to buy fresh produce from. We need to be more grateful and reduce the waste purchasing more different shaped foods.
You have received an upvote from @livesustainably. I promote and curate content that encourages and educates others in living sustainably.
I also run competitions for those making the world a better place. Check out this weeks reducing plastic competition here