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.
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