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They definitely missed the point about ugly fruit and vegetables. From speaking to some of the vendors of cheaper fruits and veggies at farmer's markets, some of them (but not all) buy the second dibs (what the supermarkets and their other obligations don't buy) as well as more irregular fruit and produce.

Now, of course there is a growing ugly fruit and vegetable movement[1]. It's becoming more mainstream and even Whole Foods is buying in[2]. There is an effort in Boston to provide good affordable ugly fruit and vegetables to underserved communities.

[1]http://www.eatingwell.com/food_news_origins/love_ugly_fruits...

[2]http://www.eater.com/2016/3/8/11178270/whole-foods-ugly-prod...

> some of them (but not all) buy the second dibs (what the supermarkets and their other obligations don't buy) as well as more irregular fruit and produce.

On top of that, the wholesalers know that these buyers will never pay a premium price, so they may get better deals on 1st tier items than mainstream supermarkets when the wholesaler really wants to sell.

In france it's already since 2014 ( the ugly fruit bowl) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2693000/Forge...

Here are two such schemes, and a BBC radio programme (available as MP3 download):

http://www.frutafeia.pt/en

http://www.uglyfruits.eu/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05mpx0k

Australia too https://www.woolworths.com.au/Shop/Discover/our-brands/the-o...

Can't restaurants just use the ugly food?

Restaurants do use the ugly food, there's many grades to choose from when you're a wholesale buyer purchasing from specialty suppliers.

> For example, I have seen one place where if they have baskets of strawberries, and some of the strawberries are getting moldy, they will by hand separate out the non moldy ones, toss the moldy ones, and repackage the baskets.

The financial crisis, explained with strawberries.

Well, to approximate a synthetic CDO squared, you'd first put all the moldy strawberries in a new basket, label it "Strawberries", send it to the rating agency where it would be rated AAA American strawberries, and then sell firms their choice of the least, middling, or most risky slices of the basket of "AAA American strawberries."

You forgot about also shorting the eventual result of those re-packaged strawberries by buying options on bismuth subsalicylate.

I'd be more worried about the molds (and their byproducts) being carcinogenic (e.g. Aflatoxins)

That would be gathering the moldy ones instead of tossing them. And perhaps putting them into an opaque "high risk, great price" strawberry basket.

To torture an analogy further.

There are lots and lots of strawberries of various different ages in a big pile. Some will be fine for the week and others are hours away from exploding in furry mould.

Someone splits them into the newest and oldest strawberries, and attaches a higher price to the former.

Someone then buys the older ones, and splits them again into the freshest and oldest. And so on, and so on until each group of strawberries is a set of near identical ages.

Finally, a customer comes along looking for strawberries to supply Wimbledon. It's in two days!

They find the basket of the very cheapest strawberries, and when asked how long they'll last they're told "Well, some will go off, but it's not like they'll all go off at the same time! As long as you buy them assuming maybe 5% will have gone off you'll be fine". One day later and 70% of them go mouldy and the rich folks at Wimbledon are shocked at the sudden shortage of strawberries.

> For example, I have seen one place where if they have baskets of strawberries, and some of the strawberries are getting moldy, they will by hand separate out the non moldy ones, toss the moldy ones, and repackage the baskets.

Having worked produce in both regular chain markets, and in "gourmet natural foods" markets, I can assure you that this is a common practice.

Makes sense to me. I get moldy strawberries so often at the local supermarket that I absolutely open the container and rumage around before I buy. If they bothered to remove the moldy ones for me, I'd appreciate it.

What's the alternative? Should they be throwing away the entire container?

At some point in the ripening, handling the berries damages them enough that it's not worth it, but otherwise the practice is fine. At the gourmet market I worked at, pretty much all the berries were taken from the original flats they arrived in and repackaged (removing the bad berries along the way).

Pro tip for delicate berries: when you get them home, remove them from the package they came in and store them in a broad container lined with paper towels, something big enough so they can be spread out with a minimum of stacking. They'll last much longer that way.

Mould is not like dirt that can just be rubbed off the product. If a package of strawberries has some mouldy berries in it, then that mould has already spread to its neighbours without being visible. All they're doing is repackaging the berries that don't have any visible mould on them, and that mould will grow very quickly.

If you buy a supposedly "mould-free" bundle that was repackaged from a mouldy bundle, the entire batch is likely to rot within a day or two of purchase.

The mould is most likely growing because a few strawberries where damaged and the rest got strawberry juice on them.

The mould is already there, just not visible, on all strawberries, waiting for some sugar and water...

They all have mold on them. It's only the ones that have mold colonies large enough to be spotted by eye that are sorted out. Does that correspond to how much mold is dangerous? Who can say?

Is this common place for frozen berries or are they generally packaged before any mold can occur?

To meet higher USDA grades, it seems like they must be pre-sorted to remove mold (among other things).

Example: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/frozen-strawberrie...

PS: Side note, either USDA AMS hasn't updated their site in awhile, or some "most recent" frozen berry standards date back to the 50s/60s. Which, I guess makes sense; I imagine the process hasn't changed that much.

Picking the good strawberries and repackaging not only should be allowed, it should be mandatory. How are we gone so far away from (agricultural) reality that such a simple and necessary task is /forbidden/ ?

And this describes grocery shopping in China, not just Chinatown. I look forward to the day I can just go to a western supermarket and not have to worry about getting jipped on veggies...save so much work even if they cost a lot more money.

FYI "jipped" is actually spelled "gypped", which is a slur against Gypsies. I only raise this because I used to say it a lot, and was unaware of its etymology and connotations.

And "Gypsies", describing the Romani people, is sometimes considered derogatory because of its negative connotations, and because it is reflective of the mistaken belief that they were itinerant Egyptians.

Interesting. I'd never heard the Egyptian part before.

They were probably originated from India.

Sorry, I had no idea where this word came from (or was spelled!). I should have just said "ripped off". In the states, the word has completely lost its original context (and more so in China).

Many people don't

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836/...

>"I encounter a lot of people who tell me that they never knew the word 'gypped' had anything to do with gypsies, or that it's offensive — especially when the word is heard not read," says University of Texas at Austin professor Ian Hancock, who was born in Britain to Romani parents. "My response to them is, That's okay. You didn't know but now you do. So stop using it. It may mean nothing to you, but when we hear it, it still hurts."

I'm in favor of re-spelling it as jipped, and removing the old connotation, because most people don't know that and it is a pretty common word now.

Not sure it works like that - you don't clean context just by changing the spelling.

You do if people also don't jump at the chance to tie it to the old concept.

Perhaps if you live in an area where the word "gypsy" isn't well-known - but it would be in most of Europe at least. And given the history of abuse and oppression (eg: forced sterilization, even before the nazi concentration camps) it's not really a word that should be forgotten - in the sense that forgetting history is a great way to later repeat the same mistakes, and commit similar abuse.

I don't really see how "jipped" doesn't end up pronounced as "gypped" - so the connotation remains. FWIW the Moby Thesaurus lists a long litany of synonyms along the lines of "con man" and "cheat" for the term "gypper".

Then let's also prohibit the word 'slave' which originates from 'slav', because many slavs were sold into slavery in the middle ages. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave

Words do lose their negative connotations, especially with different spelling.

Slav and slave have different pronunciation, not just different spelling (and actually, 'slav' in the meaning of slavic people was also spelled 'slave' - not sure if that was with a silent 'e' on the end or not). It's also as I understand it a name given to the slavic people by themselves: "Slav \Slav\ (sl[aum]v or sl[a^]v), n.; pl. {Slavs}. [A word originally meaning, intelligible, and used to contrast the people so called with foreigners who spoke languages unintelligible to the Slavs; akin to OSlav. slovo a word, slava fame, Skr. [,c]ru to hear. Cf. {Loud}.] (Ethnol.) One of a race of people occupying a large part of Eastern and Northern Europe, including the Russians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, Servo-Croats, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Wends or Sorbs, Slovaks, etc. [Written also {Slave}, and {Sclav}.] [1913 Webster]"

I'm reminded of a quote about what if the German army named their machines of war after the people they tried to exterminate, like the Apache helicopter etc.

I'm not saying we should "prohibit" words, I'm just saying I don't quite see how one could make much of a case for "gypping" being a word that isn't steeped in history of abuse of and discrimination against the Roma people. As recent as the 70s and 80s (and even to this day) for most of Europe. Eg, to quote song "Magnificent Seven" by the Clash: "What Do We Have For Entertainment? / Cops Kickin' Gypsies On The Pavement". (I never interpreted the song any other way than as a critique of systematic abuse by the police, and callousness of mass media - not as a slur by the Clash against "gypsies").

Just because "nigger" is derived from "negro" and means "black" doesn't automatically mean we can choose to pretend black people hasn't been and still are victim of racism, and decide that "nigger is now ok to use".

Because the American speakers who use it don't have a history of discriminating and abusing Roma people? There are barely any Roma people in America to abuse. Certainly in much of Europe Roma people have been treated very badly.

It's certainly true that many portrayals of black people in continental Europe often look very odd or offensive to American eyes.

I'm not sure that makes much sense. By that logic I should be fine using "indian" rather than Native American or First Nation, because it's been a thousand years since Norwegian Vikings first killed Native Americans? (Which makes doubly no sense, as there were a number of Norwegians in the early settlements of the west, and I'm sure there are a few tales of horrors to be told about some of their exploits).

As for Roma in the USA, it appears that their invisibility is more the result of an almost complete eradication of their culture, more than anything else: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/22/american-gy...

There's plenty of racism in Europe - that doesn't mean it's ok or should be accepted.

To clarify, I didn't mean that the discrimination/abuse of the Roma happened a long time ago. I meant that most discrimination/abuse of the Roma has happened in Europe, not in the US. Anti-Roma racism in Europe is obvious, ugly, and contemporary. In Europe, Roma people are a coherent social group of millions of people; in the US, without mass immigration, they are a scattered minority so small that the only thing most Americans "know" about them comes from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". With nothing to refer to, the word has been bleached of reference to Roma people in American use.

Or dig deep into English vocabulary and select a more appropriate synonym without the unwanted association: hustled, conned, swindled, scammed, deceived, ripped off, tricked, cheated, flimflammed, bamboozled, bilked, duped, hornswoggled, rooked, fleeced, burned, chiseled, snowed, fast talked, screwed, shafted, bled, suckered, stiffed, milked, gouged, overcharged... there are probably more. Some of them are shaded according to the intent of the other party and how you felt about it.

But I'm not sure any of these apply to the practice under consideration, which is selling substandard produce to people who haven't properly calibrated their expectations.

Semantic bleaching is common enough in word change. Words change enough over time that the actual origin of words can become very obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization#Semantic_bl...

Changing the spelling doesn't help. It's a pretty ugly word that I definitely used a lot as a child, and it took a while to get out of my vocabulary.

edit: I also used to say "jewed down" as a kid. There's stuff that's better just to get rid of.

edit 2: I've actually had people passionately explain to me why saying "nigger-rigged" was not a problem.

The fruit in China, at least in the big cities, is pristine. Apples are individually wrapped, everything is generally impeccable. You can get cheaper beat-up fruit in some food stalls at a cheaper price if you want.

You won't have to worry, you can rest assured you are absolutely getting jipped!

This definitely happens outside of Chinatown as well. In fact there's a place at the border of Los Altos and Cupertino (right next to a Trader Joe's in fact) that deals with produce that is very close to expiration that was clearly sent over from other supermarkets. They also sell green that aren't "baby greens" -- i.e. they're grown a bit too mature and are now bitter and tougher than what the typical grocery store patron would like.

Obviously the nutritional value is the same, so the place makes for a great source for smoothie ingredients and frozen fruits to be consumed at a later date.