How much “ugly” food we throw away | Hacker News Reader

How much “ugly” food we throw away

salon.com

42 pointsrottyguy24 comments

I am in Germany and I am a member of https://foodsharing.de/ . We collect food from shops that would throw it away otherwise.

In my town, we have a cooperation with a small organic supermarket where we collect food twice a week. Sometimes the quantity of the food that gets thrown out is sheer incredible: http://i.imgur.com/5mb4WN1.jpg

Over 95% of the collected food is still edible. It's mostly unpackaged food such as fruit, vegetables and bread, but sometimes packaged food as well with expired "Best before"-date (which honestly doesn't say anything about the quality of the contents).

We usually split these quantities up with 4-6 people and it has fed me well over the past months.

Here in Portugal there's also a project called Refood, founded by an American, which collects food from restaurants, coffeeshops, etc, and provides them to people in need. It's now distributing 24 thousand meals per month.

That reminds me of a quite old doc that kids were expected to watch in schools during my childhood, Island of Flowers (with english subs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amg08t0TQOY

It's about a small river island in Porto Alegre, Brazil (in 1989). Food thrown away would be given to pigs first, and the rest discarded by the animals was scavenged by the poor people living there. It's a pretty intense scene to watch...

It's a well known fact (for brazilians, that is) that in Brazil we waste and throw away to much good food but people stopped bothering years ago when some bills passed stating anyone giving/reselling thrown away food to others -- no matter how perfect they were/looked -- could go to jail and pay some fines if anything happened to the consumers of such food.

It's quite easy to find fantastic food in street markets or at the back of restaurantes at the end of the day, specially veggies and fruits. That makes projects like food sharing etc extremely difficult.

You might like this story about the 'Solidarity Fridge' in Spain. The mayor in the town hosting it tweaked rules about food so that people could stock a public fridge for anyone in need. Some people fill it with leftovers, others prepare food especially for it.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/13/431960054/to-...

>some bills passed stating anyone giving/reselling thrown away food to others -- no matter how perfect they were/looked -- could go to jail and pay some fines if anything happened to the consumers of such food.

Is that something that actually happened? In the US we tend to think that's a rule, but the opposite is true, there's explicit legal protection.

The US constantly shuts down unlicensed charity programs that set up feed stations in public. Donated food is subject to the same strict controls as sold food. A cafe can't donate a PB&J sandwich that has sat on the shelf unrefridgerated for 4 hours

I was talking about giving food to charities, not trying to set up a half-baked charity.

The big issue here is food that's still good but undesirable, not food that has gone past regulated safety limits.

Especially when manufacturers are setting arbitrary 'best' dates.

Given how much processed food we eat I find it hard to believe the situation is that bad.

Nobody is making orange juice out of perfect oranges.

That's sort of what I was thinking. I would imagine a huge amount of ugly carrots for example end up chopped up and in cans or frozen bags or mass produced food products. Who knows what the vegetables in a Swanson pot pie looked like when they were in a field somewhere.

Salon is a pretty awful magazine. The bias/inaccuracy's is pretty full on.

It would be interesting to see if processed foods companies using off cuts contributes to fast food often being cheaper than if you made it yourself.

This isn't orginally from Salon. It's from Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/food/its-time-eat-ugly-food-you-wont...). Not that I know if Alternet is any better...

"Given how much processed food" you (in your country might) eat. Don't generalize like that. It's not because you don't see the problem with your own eyes that it doesn't exist.

The nice thing about processed food is that you can ship it across the world.

Heck, you can do that with most fresh food.

Last Week Tonight did a pretty good special on this topic as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY

I've told this story before, but about 20 years ago I met a guy from a farming family. The family farm supplied zucchini/courgettes (I think it was) to supermarkets. The supermarkets had rules about what range of curvature was acceptable. Previously the extra bendy produce would essentially be waste (turned in to animal food, composted, etc), but with the rise of farmers markets and natural/organic food they were able to sell the bendy produce at a premium directly to the consumer.

And here's a French supermarket that is successfully selling 'ugly' produce at reduced prices:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/ugly-fruits-and-veg...

Yes most cities have a discount produce shop that sells the B grade stuff.

Until a few years ago, EU had a regulation that stated "all bananas and cucumbers must be free of abnormal curvature and at least 14 cm in length. "

Not sure if I want to know what legislators did with the fruits...

That's not true, they define the "class" of banana/similar. It's there so that when one supplier in a country says "we'll deliver X tons of Class 1 bananas" there's some definition around what they're actually delivering. This gets more important as you start dealing with different items that have the same name in different countries.

Ok, they didn't ban them, they just put them together in a class with crappy, chemistry-grown fruits/veggies, so that nobody would buy them.

I don't remember the exact text, so I probably shouldn't have put quotes, but still, what I said is true in practice.

Anyway, it was an absolutely terrible idea that has been left in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_%28EC%29...

It's just overly-pedantic input validation in the legal system; if you're going to have rules that mention bananas, you have to define what is and what is not a banana. Especially if different fruits have different tax treatments.

I don't think it's worth getting more upset about an uneaten carrot or chicken than about an uneaten pine cone or bear.

Given that the former examples take human effort and resources to grow while the latter don't, the two aren't equivalent. If we had perfectly efficient farms we'd save a huge amount of both energy and money providing food.

Arguably we already have perfectly efficient bear production, insofar as we don't spend resources on them because we don't eat them.

The amount of human effort wasted producing food is probably pretty small compared to the amount wasted, say, filling out HR forms.

It makes a huge difference where the uneaten carrot ends up. If it's left on the field it can rot and become fertilizer. If it ends up in landfill, it decomposes in an anaerobic environment and creates methane.

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