Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests | Hacker News Reader

Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests

theguardian.com

68 pointsvmateixeira43 comments

Waste like this is basically a symptom of an inefficient logistics network and market conditions.

The fresh fruit you see at the grocery store all "made the cut" what didn't make the cut became canned tomatos, apple concentrate, frozen hash browns and other more processed fruits. Nobody cares if a canned tomato looks lumpy.

The problem is that the opportunities to redirect produce that doesn't pass QC are basically nonexistent after a pretty early part of the supply chain. Supply chain logistics are a mostly solved problem. This won't be fixed until the benefit outweighs the cost. The cost will most likely have to decrease for that to happen. A complicating factor is that produce optimized for one track (e.g. fresh apples) might perform more poorly if repurposed after failing QC (e.g applesauce) so in some situations it makes more sense to just discard stuff that doesn't pass QC late in the supply chain than to redirect it into role it's not optimized for.

If it was more profitable to redirect stuff that doesn't pass QC then people would do it. Many restaurants already dispose of food waste separately and give it to pig farms. Pig farmer reduces feed cost and the restaurant reduces disposal costs.

> A complicating factor is that produce optimized for one track (e.g. fresh apples) might perform more poorly if repurposed

What optimisations do you have in mind?

An apple bred to stay crisp for a long time on the shelf and give a nice crunch when you eat it might not make the best applesauce.

Oh. I'm surprised that the difference is considered to be that great.

In the case of apples it isn't (yet?) since there's plenty of good-tasting ones that are pretty durable to begin with, but for something like tomatoes I'd be disappointed if my canned tomatoes were the ones optimized for display rather than taste.

Growing up in the South it's fairly common to see that many people think that the fruit you won't eat from the hand, for whatever reason, are often better for certain recipes of desserts and preserves.

That's because it is. Different acid concentrations, cell walls strengths, etc lead to some apples being better suited for some things than others. Kind of like fillet vs strip, it's all the same meat, but very different, and cooks differently too.

Soft, sweet apples are better for pies. Maybe throw in a couple of crisp, tart ones for texture and flavor, but you probably wouldn't want to eat a pie with nothing but Granny Smiths.

That's curious. I specifically choose Granny Smith when making apple crumble! They are hard and almost sour when fresh, but are broken and humbled by the heat.

Most pie recipes I've seen call for multiple varieties, especially from different categories http://frugalliving.about.com/od/foodsavings/qt/Best-Apples-... My grandmother used mostly Braeburn and Northern Spies, my mother uses Crispin and Granny Smith. I think a crumble might break down the apples more than a pie with its protective crust, so harder varieties might work better there.

"The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry"

I mean, you can make a case for damaging the environment, but the thrown away food is hardly the reason people are hungry. We clearly don't have a shortage problem.

I agree there's not a shortage problem. We are who definitely need to change our mentality. As an individual customers, not wanting only the pretty and shiny ones. As a company, by not wanting only max profit disregarding environment harm. Considering that this may never happen, it would be good if there would be no logistic issues/transportation costs (maybe subsidized by the government?) in order to ship this perfect fruit to the hungry.

Once I did and experiment, here in the UK. I bought a bag of apples from Aldi (non organic ones, but not sure if this makes any difference) and stored one on top of the refrigerator. Six months were passed and it was still looking pretty and shiny. That scared my ass off.

"Six months were passed and it was still looking pretty and shiny."

Given the right conditions, it's not a problem for apples to stay fresh for a long time. We usually keep apples, grown in our own garden without any "chemicals", through the winter in a cellar or attic. Not sure if it work for all kinds of apples though.

I wasn't aware of this. Are those natural or GMO?

Actually tried to look up the average 'expiry' date for an apple and could only find industrial storage dates with what 'experts' call MAP storage [1].

[1] http://shelflifeadvice.com/content/how-long-will-apples-last...

Natural, we did plant them ourselves. I haven't tried to keep them afresh myself, my father is taking care of this. However, after quick googling I've found that it works only for some kinds of apples and the are certain tricks to keep them fresh for a long time.

That's really great, congratulations! Sometimes I wish I could have my own bit of land to grow my own food!

The big orchards store apples in "controlled atmosphere" rooms, and they keep quite well for many months. (Anecdotally true from shopping at Bishop's Orchards in Guilford, CT.)

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/08/the-science-of-cold-apple-st...

As much as we want to blame individual consumers, a lot of this problem goes back to Big Box Retailers. In many, many places there simply isn't a choice - you go to one of either Walmart or Kroger or Safeway to get food, because that's the only market in 20 miles from your home.

Because these places put such a high demand on perfect produce, they can charge more for that produce, and Americans find it harder and harder to afford eating their fruits and veg because it's too expensive to have food that rots when you're working 10 hour days vs. something in a can that is immortal. It can be quite difficult justifying the price tag on that bag of apples when you're not sure you can get through the whole bag, and two individual apples will end up costing you just as much as the bag because they carry the bullshit "organic" label. (And those are usually the two options you get - no non-organic freestanding take-as-many-as-you-think-you-can-eat apples by the pound for you; same goes for potatoes, carrots, onions, etc.) Lose-lose for the consumer.

I've been told again and again that there's some evidence us consumers have to be looked out for and have perfect, pristine produce, and yet I happily buy from a farmer's market the most knobbly carrots and potatoes and see many of my neighbors doing the same out here in Mountain View. They're often even more flavorful than the supermarket alternative, and since they're from nearer by (and didn't go through the industrial food transportation and refrigeration system where they're battered and shocked), they often don't spoil as quickly either.

Maybe the real problem is that Big Box Retailers have overconsolidated markets so much that there's no venue to sell this "less-than-perfect" produce to people.

> I've been told again and again that there's some evidence us consumers have to be looked out for and have perfect, pristine produce

> out here in Mountain View

It looks like you and your community are ahead of the curve on this one. You're also less than 200 miles from some of the best agricultural land in the world, so of course good fresh fruit and vegetables are easy to get. In the northeast during winter, the choice is between mushy, bland big box produce or no produce at all.

> Big Box Retailers have overconsolidated markets so much that there's no venue to sell this "less-than-perfect" produce to people

I disagree because we, the individual consumer, are the ones who buys, therefore we may have the power to make this to change to some extent, and I see what you do as an example of that. If people would buy more from local producers it's expected for the Big Box retailers to see their revenues drop. At that point they'll need to make a change.

> It can be quite difficult justifying the price tag on that bag of apples when you're not sure you can get through the whole bag, and two individual apples will end up costing you just as much as the bag because they carry the bullshit "organic" label

This may be another key issue. Do we really need to buy a whole bag of apples, just because we see it as a bargain, even if we end up throwing half of it away?

>but the thrown away food is hardly the reason people are hungry.

What is the reason?

From what I understand it's more of a delivery or logistics problem and its variations. Sometimes it's not worth it to certain people to deliver the food and in some cases someone takes the food before it arrives.

These days it's mostly an economic thing. Food's there but some people don't have money to buy it. http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fac...

That link (at least, the section you linked because I didn't read the entire page) doesn't say anything about it being economic, it just gives the numbers and even goes to show that we've apparently been making progress in reducing world hunger.

Also, it's kind of a good thing for economic causes to be producing excess. The other option is to be under-producing (because 100% efficiency is a pretty hard target to hit, you're either going to be over or under). If this was the case, it would drive food prices up. So even though there would be no waste, there would be even more want.

While I'm generally libertarian and I don't like our current regime, I'm in favor of some modest government subsidies on food, especially food that is easy to store. The subsidies should take the form of the government buying and storing the food, and cycling out the middling-old food cheaply to those in need to keep the system moving. (This is not 'taking advantage' of those in need, because I'm explicitly spec'ing out foods that store well and aren't bad just because they're a bit older.) Because capitalism is remarkably efficient, which is just fine, until you plan for about 101% of the food you need this year and some unanticipated massive disaster happens.

(Note that there is a such thing as an "anticipated" disaster. Capitalism does in fact plan for some slack in the system, through insurance, futures trading, and other mechanisms, which is why we don't starve every single time there's a minor drought. But it'll only plan for so many sigmas out from normal, whereas Mother Nature is not so polite.)

Ah sorry, I couldn't link properly. The bit I meant was:

>What are the causes of hunger?

>What are the causes of hunger is a fundamental question, with varied answers.

>Poverty is the principal cause of hunger. The causes of poverty include poor people’s lack of resources, an extremely unequal income distribution in the world and within specific countries, conflict, and hunger itself. As of 2015 (2011 statistics), the World Bank has estimated that there were just over 1 billion poor people in developing countries who live on $1.25 a day or less...

I'm not sure discarding in the field damages the climate much either. It's what plants normally do - grow and then decay where they are.

Between the fertilizer, fuel and pesticides used in modern agricultural practice there is some difference with a native plant dropping seeds.

"I would say at times there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle" One of these is waste, one not. Perhaps their definition of waste needs to be reviewed.

Yes feeding cattle excess (over demand) crops could be called recycling for instance. Get something of value out of it instead of e.g. burning it.

It's a waste if that is not an efficient way to feed cattle. There's a reason we don't grow watermelons intentionally as cattle feed.

Wow. I started growing my own vegetables a few years ago, and of course, I eat everything that I can successfully produce. However, I'm always struck by how much different my own tomatoes (for example) look than the ones that I can buy at the grocery store - mine are usually smaller, and cracked in a couple of places, but still perfectly edible. It made me wonder what "professional" farmers do with similar produce - I always assumed that they sold it to companies that made tomato sauce or something and sold the better ones to consumers. I never thought they'd throw away perfectly good vegetables.

For thousands of years people ate produce that often had unevenly-colored skins, but tasted good.

Food industry corporations have persuaded most people to instead eat produce that looks perfect but tastes worse. And they tell us that is progress.

Food production should not be subsidized, and environmental negative externalities forced into prices, via taxes eg. (Ys, this would have to be compensated with more income transfers for the poor)

For sure this could be a solution. Unfortunately I see no way of this to happen.

>> Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill,

Only one of those I would call "thrown away". Left in the field to "rot" is a form of fertilizer. Being fed to livestock, animals that would otherwise eat something else, equally isn't waste. These are products being put to good uses, perhaps not the most lucrative uses for which they were designed, but uses nonetheless. This is farmers recycling unmarketable product. It isn't waste.

Only when product winds up as landfill, that is waste.

> scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest.

So what? Most plants on the planet's surface are "abandoned in the field".

Where I live, there are vast areas of blackberry bush. Most of it is not picked by humans. Oh, the annual waste!

These vegetables will help fertilize the next crop. It's just not yield-efficient use of the agricultural surface area, that's all.

There is an opportunity for someone who can figure out how to grow perfect vegetables: they can make as much profit using a small fraction of the farm size.

I would say 10%-15% is lost to insurance fraud. A lot of times when the crop yield is less than 50% of expected yield farmers will just disc the fields and claim 100% loss.

Source?

Do the crop insurance companies not go out and verify the claim?

Do they not correlate crop loss with other events in the area (flooding, high winds)?

It was just conjecture on what I grew up around. They do go and verify the claim but most of the time they won't fault the farmers if the field is already reseeded after all they need to make sure the cover crop comes in good if the main crop failed. There's a lot of insurance fraud in agriculture mostly because the companies don't have the resources to go and check every farm. And to your final point they do correlate it to natural disasters, those events are rarely as catastrophic as they're reported though.

Why I subscribe to http://www.imperfectproduce.com/

Let me guess, it's CA only.

make ethanol from it?

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