Associations, groups and actual companies were born, gathering their effort to re-distribute the food that would not make the cut to supermarket shelves or groceries baskets. ![]() The ugly produce movement took its first major steps around the mid-2010s, with Australia leading the way and Europe following suit. Things did not change in the past decade: if anything, they got worse, but a movement is on the rise to combat these damaging habits. ![]() Plus, the environment suffers a very heavy blow from food waste: as FAO was pointing out almost 10 years ago, ‘if food waste could be represented as its own country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind China and the United States’, due to the land, energy, water and resoruces unnecessarily needed to produce, process and get rid of it (food dumps release methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). The moral aspect, to begin with, cannot be overlooked: almost 830 million people are considered to be in danger of starving ( UN data, 2021), a situation that got worse with the recent pandemic, and yet almost 33% of our food ends up rotting. ![]() The economic implications of this issue are probably the most immediate that come to mind, but there are other big ones. ‘If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic metre skips, it would fill 80m million of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon, and encircle it once,’ said The Guardian in 2016. The big pictureġ.6 billion tonnes of the food produced worldwide goes to waste every year according to The Food and Agricultural Organisations of the UN (FAO) that’s roughly one third of the total supplies the planet generates, adding up to a mind-blowing $160 billion in value. Aside from a relatively small amount of that going to landfill, the rest of it goes to waste. Wholesalers operate one more process, keeping all those products that just don’t look appealing off the shelves. So, where do all the unworthy fruits and vegetables go? Unfortunately, you might have guessed correctly. Once the law requirements are matched, buyers’ likes need to be satisfied, and that’s another obstacle. But even so, anywhere on the planet this could still not be enough. The US market is apparently ruled by aesthetics: products must be blemish-free or not oddly shaped for them to reach the market. Together with the mandatory health and safety standards that need to be met, fruits and vegetables are tasked with observing very strict cosmetic criteria in order to proceed and be presented to the general market.įor example, according to EU regulations: apples are required to weigh at least 90g strawberries must measure 18mm or 25mm in diameter, depending on their class lemons must contain at least 20% of juice walnuts must respect controlled humidity percentages bell peppers must not be sunburnt and up until 1998, cucumbers must have had a 10mm bend over 10cm length (the rule has been repealed). When thinking about the journey fruits and vegetables endure, from farm to table and bar tops, you’d be hard pressed to imagine the rigorous checks they go through. Here, we outline the implications of food waste on our planet and explain how you can be part of the solution ![]() The ugly food movement has been fighting the food-waste-fight around the world, but there is still plenty of work to be done.
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