Four years ago, North America’s potato growers formed a cartel. By managing supply, and keeping demand—and prices—high, the United Potato Growers of America, which later helped found a Canadian counterpart, aims to be the OPEC of spuds. Within a year of forming, however, United was facing public revulsion: the consortium, it turned out, was asking farmers to destroy crops to boost prices. In a single year, the Idaho chapter took roughly four million 100-lb. bags of already harvested, perfectly good potatoes and plowed them right back into the ground—a legal, if disgusting, measure. It took one farmer three days to bury his share: $100,000 worth. In 2006 alone, United helped erase 6.8 million hundredweight potato sacks from the U.S. and Canadian markets. Farmers’ open-market returns soared—up 49 per cent over the previous year.
Response to this news was uniformly horrified, but the truth is, in much of the West, produce is destroyed every day of every week, on a much larger scale, and for a reason even more offensive than profit: aesthetics. We’ve grown accustomed in North America to fancy supermarkets with shiny, unblemished fruits and vegetables. But it’s no accident that all that perfect produce lines the shelves: fruits and veggies are culled to ensure that only those with the right size, shape, style or colour end up for sale. A hint of wear is fatal for an otherwise perfectly edible apple, which then winds up in the trash.
Between 25 and 40 per cent of most fruit and vegetable crops are in fact rejected by Western supermarkets. One British supermarket insists that all carrots be perfectly straight—“so customers can peel the full length in one easy stroke,” a store manager explained to Tristram Stuart, author of a new book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. A farmer, meanwhile, estimated that fully one-third of his crop is out-graded for cosmetic reasons, creating mountains of reject potatoes: outsized, double-lobed, too big, too small, too wonky, with eyes, not perfectly smooth, not perfectly rounded—all, of course, perfectly edible. In Britain, government law actually makes it illegal to sell carrots of less than one centimetre in diameter, and those with a fork, or secondary branch—all naturally occurring features. Globally, banana producers are among the worst offenders: waste is estimated at between 20 and 40 per cent.
Supermarket waste is just one part of a colossal and growing environmental problem: food waste. And consumers share the blame. The way food is produced in the West has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000. The agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices, creating an abundance of food, and profits. Consumers, lulled by cheap prices, are unaware of the hidden costs of producing so much, or the staggering waste required to stock the supermarket machine.
The story begins in the supermarket, which, in the U.K., generates an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of food waste per year. Waste, in fact, is so much a part of that industry worldwide that it has spawned a euphemism: shrink, that is, food sent to landfill because it didn’t sell. In Japan that figure is 2.6 million tonnes. In Canada, nearly 40 per cent of all food produced is wasted (in the U.S., the figures nears 50 per cent). And in fact, those numbers could be even higher: Christopher Haskins, formerly the chairman of Northern Foods, one of Britain’s food-processing firms, estimates that 70 per cent of all food produced in Britain is being wasted. Stuart, who writes with the seething anger of a modern Upton Sinclair, blames sloppy management, historic neglect of environmental and social responsibilities, and slowness to adopt more efficient technologies. Then, of course, there’s cosmetics. “Supermarkets say consumers won’t buy wonky produce,” Stuart explains. But when in 2007, Britain’s potato crop failed and retailers were forced to sell knobby, natural-looking potatoes, “no one batted an eyelid”: sales were not affected, nor did consumers log any complaints.
Rather, these strict aesthetic standards are being fuelled by supermarkets’ own desire for uniformity and picture-perfect displays, says Jonathan Bloom, author of the forthcoming book, American Wasteland. “Appearance has trumped taste, and nutrition,” says Bloom, who, in researching the book, took a job in the produce department of a North Carolina grocery store to see what was happening behind closed doors. There, one of his primary roles was culling and chucking “questionable” produce. (“There’s no grey area in retail,” he adds with a rueful chuckle.)
Laws, perversely, seem to bolster food waste. In the Europe, apples under 50 mm in diameter or 70 grams in weight have been banned. (Those too red or not red enough, meanwhile, have been rejected by supermarkets.) To the absurdity, add European “uniformity rules.” Yes, bureaucrats in Brussels have cooked up laws to ensure that all EU citizens are eating fruit and veggies of the same shape and size. In 2008, one British wholesaler was forced to chuck 5,000 kiwis for being four grams lighter than the 62 gram cut-off—“the equivalent of being one millimeter too thin,” says Stuart.
That raises the obvious question: why wouldn’t growers and supermarkets give away the food instead of throwing it out? “Inertia,” Bloom explains, is part of it. The effort required to bag up waste produce instead of just chucking it in a dumpster with the rest is “all the barrier some people need,” he says. In the U.S. at least, liability used to be an issue, though it is no longer. To encourage supermarkets to donate excess food, Congress enacted the Good Samaritan act, which protects supermarkets from legal liability if they donate in good faith. But other legal disincentives remain. The kiwi owner, for instance, could have been fined up to $9,000 had he given away the fruit (government officials say such rules are in place to ensure quality and uniformity).
That said, most supermarkets proudly insist they do donate surplus food to charity. Safeway, one of Western Canada’s dominant supermarket chains, for example, told Maclean’s it donates $10 million per year in food and “in kind donations”—though it didn’t say whether any of that food was diverted from waste. And in 2007, Sainsbury’s claimed to have given away 6,680 tonnes of food, an admirable sum—unless you consider that this represented 10 per cent of its annual discard, a figure typical of the industry in Britain. The reality, according to Stuart, is that most waste goes straight to the landfill.
Pages: 1 2
Print
Comment
The need for uniform, unblemished food in supermarkets is what favours factory farms more than anything else. If your food is unblemished, it is probably being produced with some amount of fungicides, pesticides, or genetic engineering. Organic doesn't always mean what people think it means.
If you want to support a type of food production that people are always saying that they want, you need to buy a variety of foods, and a varieties of particular types of foods. So not only should you be buying things of every shape and colour, you should also buy individual products (say tomatoes) that are different shapes, sizes and flavours.
Factory farms are good at producing very few monocultures which are best suited to that type of farming. Smaller units of production are able to give personal attention to products that require it. Why should you care? Because varieties selected for appearance, tolerance of hardship, and fast growth aren't usually the most nutritious or tasty.
Thank you for this article. We are all hypocrites talking about sustainability on one side and demanding the perfect fruit or vegetable on the other. It is time we realize that the food we eat comes from organisms that come in all sizes and shapes. When we look for the uniform perfection we see in supermarkets it comes at a huge price. You have highlighted one of the untold stories of our agricultural systems. Fruit and vegetables that does not make the grade and that is perfectly good to eat goes to waste at an alarming rate! To become really sustainable we have to start by changing our own ways and be satisfied with produce that may have a blemish on the skin or be odd looking but tasty!
The over-production caused by farming subsidies, which result in food wastage, are a pragmatic, practical choice of governments. Even in the most developed countries of North America and Europe, the vast majority of farms are still small (under 2,000 acres) family farms. The sad reality is that most family farmers are not too bright, and there are only so many truck driver and cleaning women needed in any nation. Even when farming is only 2 percent of the population, it is actually cheaper for a government to pay those families farming subsidies than it would be to pay the same number of people welfare. The same equation of governance is far worse, naturally, in the nations of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast and Central Asia, China, and East Europe, including Russia. The only way to remove the restriction is to reduce the number and percentage of slow-witted people in the world, which no one has been able to do yet, with a practical, realistic plan.
A good start would be in reducing you.
Wow, that was just pure, nonsensical schlock. Were you terrorized as a child by a retarded rogue farmer or do you just work for Monsanto?
Your comment, like the previous one, is not worth a reply. What evidence do you have that I am wrong, aside from rhetorical blanket assertions containing no data? The physical, biological fact remains that most — more than 75 percent — of family farm members are extremely stupid, so stupid that they can't work in any occupation more complex than farming, they can't even do that competently, and they are extraneous and superfluous to human society. They are unnecessary, redundant, and nothing but a burden on everyone else, who actually do contribute to humanity, and keep farming families alive with our taxes. Denials and maudlin rhetoric won't change the physical, biological facts.
Ya ok buddy….farmers feed our cities everyday! Our produce and meat products would be through the roofs in cost if we had to get it shipped to our grocery stores all the time…..farmers pay the same taxes as city folks you turd!!! How about you go do a bull and die slow! Your a piece of poop and a disgrace to society!! Have a nice day homo412AD
Thank you for proving my point about the average IQ of some people. For your information, about 20 percent of the farms in Canada are very well run businesses. Some are even family businesses in their third generation of profit-making. Naturally, they are all far larger than a paltry 2,000 acres, a size so inefficient it can't possibly make a profit, but can only be supported by taxpayers, like any family on welfare.
For your information, farming families supported by government subsidies, like any public sector unionist, have 100 percent of their gross income paid for by people who do work and pay taxes. Therefore, their taxes are paid by the taxpayers, and they don't pay any taxes at all themselves. Possibly the arithmetic of gross, taxes, and net is a little too complicated for you to grasp.
The successful farmers in Canada make a lot of money, and they have no need to be supported by taxpayers in any way. Farming is the easiest occupation in the world, and making a lot of money farming is very easy as well. All that's required is an IQ above 85.
I appreciate the article and am disappointed with our culture. What disturbs me is the by line on the top of the page. The big concern regarding the waste is on the environmental impact. What of the poor and starving people all over the world. I read articles exposing charitable organizations telling the poor all over the world to have fewer children and more abortions when we in the west alone trash more food every day than most of these people eat in a month. We sit hear and talk about environmental impact. How about something a little more immediate like the starving refugees of war and famine.
Re: Nancy McDonald's Article, "what a Waste"
David Blume has the perfect solution on a farmer's level what to do with the waste. All that waste can easily be turned into ethanol for fuel in cars displacing gasoline. the material left over from making the ethanol is perfect organic fertilizer! Se his site:
http://www.permaculture.com/
Hans Duerichen, PEng
Here is David Blume's video:
Regarding your article " What a Waste. "
I feel this problem of too many people wasting good food has a spiritual base to it – ingratitude. A lack of thanksgiving to God for giving you your daily bread.
I went through some interesting times when younger and once ran out of money – with only 4 cents in my pocket – and was homeless for awhile, but would not beg or steal, so went three days without food, before I got a job with a temp agency – this was in Toronto. This taught me a good lesson in humility and taught me to appreciate my daily bread which God gives me. Rarely go to restaurants, but this evening I did go out for a meal, and ate every last little tiny morsel.
Ray Wegner
Hans has an interesting option, but as someone who has worked in the field (pardon the pun) the economics of it just aren’t there and with natural gas and oil supplies increasing they Likely won’t be for decades.
“Waste” happens in all aspects of a capitalist economy. (how many thousands of paper copies of macleans go unread some aftr being shipped across the continent?) In fact it is a Principle tenet of capitalism that there needs to be ‘creative destruction’. Compare the surplusses of food that permit us as consumers to be picky and only buy the best. Ever see a potato that was grown in poland before the wall fell? Try peeling the lumpy scabby mass. To single out the AG sector for the frankly necessary waste is to dmonstrate ones ignorance of hoiw markets work and in the long run result in less, not more, waste. Take for instance apples. Technology was developed for controlled atmosphere (CA) storage that enabled apples to be stored in pristine condition for up to a year. The only difficulty is that any scabby or damaged apples that type of storage will cause the entire lot to rot far too quickly. Thus very strict culling is required. The result – some waste at harvest but far less than would occur if CA wasn’t used and over time breeding, cultural and harvesting practices have resulted in far far fewer culls – the economc pressure on producers begat it.
Thus pointing to (very) isolated incidents of attempts at supply control is wrong-headed if well-meaning. (some of the most evil acts of humankind were well-meaning, i digress) This includes the culling that happens at the shop level – a spoiled banana causes the others to rot more quickly, and it turns off consumers so less are purchased and presumably eaten. The trickle-down impact of bad food handling in a shop will either put the shop out of business or make it handle and manage it’s inventory better.
And if you are someone who still thinks it is unacceptable you either never eat bananas or any other tropical fruit because of the evironmental impact of the transport involved or you are a hypocrite.
There is a terrific book by Peter Singer and Jim Mason called "The way we eat: Why our food choices matter". It explores (among other things) the ethics involved in chosing our daily bread.
I highly recomend reading this!
Well then we should burn it for fuel!!! Oh wait, that idea is already being subsidized with billions of our money.
The spuds story is nothing unique. Dairy and egg producers ALL throw out produce every year after their quotas have been filled.
And how many hogs were "depopulated" this year, using millions in government subsidies to do so? And this after governments spent billions in the 1990s subsidizing super hog barns to the point that the market could no longer absorb the production?
As an example of how silly this all got, consider that Manitoba has a population of 10 hogs for every person in the province, largely because of ridiculous subsidies over the past 15 years to "encourage diversification amongst Manitoba's farmers." (That's 1 million Tobans; ten million hogs.) Precisely how did the government ever think that could end well?
This is the problem Monsanto genetically modified food and world health organization run by Freemasons.
Get rid off both the world is happier.
WHY is Canada Tim Horton throws food to the garbage after is not sold each day or why jewish synagogues after parties throw food instead giving it to the poor.Canadians don't have heart. All info http://www.notcanada.com FORUMS
garbage is now slightly challenged food unfit for human consumption