Nearly half of the fruit and vegetables grown on U.S. farms never reach consumers, because the “cult of perfection” demands perfectly shaped peppers and blemish-free apples, says the Guardian.
Stores and homes toss one-third of all foodstuffs, worth $160 billion, according to one government estimate. But that total doesn’t factor in the 20-25 percent of produce that abandoned in the field, lest a store spot one mangled fruit and return a farm’s entire shipment, writes the Guardian.
“What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect or it gets rejected,” says Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables from North Carolina and central Florida. “It is perfect to them or they turn it down. And then you are stuck.”
Some growers sell their unwanted produce as feed for livestock. “I would say at times there is 25 percent of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle,” says Wayde Kirschenman, whose family has been growing potatoes and other vegetables near Bakersfield, California, since the 1930s. “Sometimes it can be worse.”
Both the United States and United Nations pledged to halve food waste by 2030. Yet change needs to come from the bottom up, and at the bottom, farmers are still nervous to challenge retailers who won’t accept anything less than perfect, says the Guardian.