Don't Judge a Fruit by Its Color: Produce Standards and Food Waste in America

www.huffingtonpost.com - April 19th, 2013

Picture an idyllic family-run peach farm in rural Connecticut. There are rows upon rows stretching for acres with luscious and zingy Red Garnets, Washingtons, or Raritan Roses. I spent the summer after graduating from high school in the late '90s there, pruning, picking, and selling the fruit. People came from all over to pick their own or drive up to the small wooden hut where we sold any of our forty-two varieties of juicy peaches and sweet local blueberries next to homemade jams and our sticky honey. It was hard work, made harder by people's perception of the perfect peach. As much as we explained to customers that we only picked when the fruit was ripe, they would still frown on the occasional blemish or split pit.

Now, take a stroll through your local supermarket. What do you see but towers of oranges, bananas, broccoli -- a cornucopia of fresh produce. The supermarkets are never supposed to look depleted. Having shelves consistently fully stocked with flawless, standardized produce means there is an unnecessary amount of waste piling up outside our markets and in our fields, as farmers overproduce to keep up with the demand for the perfect produce. Even if I wanted to buy all these fruits and vegetables, workers in the markets would be restocking the shelves as I walked out the door.

It's no secret that we're a wasteful nation. According to Dana Gunders, in her paper for the National Resources Defense Council, 40 percent of food produced in America is thrown away.

Every step along the way in food production some food slips through the cracks and ends up in a landfill, through harvesting, transport, at the market and in the home. But a significant amount of the food that is grown never even makes it to the supermarket. Some of this waste is due to environmental factors and the risks involved with farming, other waste comes from a lack of labor to harvest or transport the produce. However, much of the waste can be attributed to culling the goods in order to meet high government-issued industry standards of size, color, weight, blemish level, and Brix (the measure for sugar content).

We can't only blame the government standards. As we get used to identical green beans and bruise-free apples, we become less involved with the realness of our food. It's hard for me to believe that a marginally undersized parsnip wouldn't be as delicious as the ones that are allowed into the supermarket. When I buy produce I mostly look for those in season and ripeness. Knowing that marks and spots can happen naturally reminds me that food was grown and not created in a lab. If I get it home and it looks slightly more offensive, I cut that bit out and move on.

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Big Ag Profits From Food Waste

www.huffingtonpost.com - January 14th, 2013

Almost half of all the food we produce in the world never makes it to a plate. Today, we allow a staggering two billion tons of food to go to waste each and every year. If we eliminated this unnecessary food waste, we could potentially provide 60-100 percent more food to feed the world's growing population.

These are just some of the shocking statistics from a new report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME), highlighting once again how staggeringly wasteful our food and farming system is. But it's not just simply the food that's going to waste: think about all the wasted energy, water, chemicals and labor that went into producing, transporting, and storing what is ultimately just left to rot.

The IME's new report mirrors a 2011 study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes and Prevention. The FAO found that industrialized countries waste 222 million tons of food every year -- almost equivalent to the annual net food production in sub-Saharan Africa. In the United States alone, we waste more than 29 million tons of food each year. That's enough to fill the 90,000-seat Rose Bowl every day, according to food-waste guru, Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland.

Look around and it's clear that we're not just wasting food by letting it rot or throwing it away. It's a well-known fact that we already produce more than enough food today for everyone to have the nourishment they need to thrive. But while the number of people suffering from chronic hunger increased from under 800 million in 1996 to over one billion in 2009, obesity and diet-related ill health in the West is running out of control. Although the U.S. makes up only five percent of the world's population, we account for almost a third of the world's weight due to obesity. As our diets have changed to incorporate the ever-increasing availability of cheaper meat and dairy products and highly processed food, devastating diet-related diseases -- like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and some diet-related cancers -- have reached epidemic levels in the US.

In 2008, 33.8 percent of U.S. adults were diagnosed as clinically obese. One in three people born in 2000 in the U.S. will develop Type 2 diabetes by 2050. Between 1976 and 1980 and 2007 to 2008, obesity among U.S. pre-school age children -- we're talking about kids of just two to five years of age -- increased from five percent to 10.4 percent. During the same period, obesity among six to 11-year-olds increased from 6.5 percent to 19.6 percent, and among 12 to 19-year-olds we saw an increase from five percent to 18.1 percent. According to a study of the national costs attributed to overweight and obese people, medical expenses associated with these conditions alone accounted for 9.1 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 2006 -- and may have reached as high as $78.5 billion ($92.6 billion in 2002 dollars).

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