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Comment by mogadsheu | Hacker News Reader

The American food supply chain has a luxuriously high waste rate. It’s an issue that a few companies are trying to tackle, eg Imperfect Produce.

Wasted food in the home though is mostly a cultural/price issue, as well as a misalignment issue between seller and consumer. Grocery stores try and increase AOV by selling you a 3lb bundle of carrots because they believe it to be profit maximizing to do so, at the cost of deadweight loss borne by the customer if they don’t eat all that they buy.

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Is ugly fruit/veg a significant cause of food waste? My understanding was that ugly fruit/veg gets turned into soup or sauces.

Yeah there was definitely an article on HN some time ago explaining how the "imperfect" produce movement achieves exactly nothing - ugly fruits and veggies are used for other things, so to actually bring those to the stores you're not taking them from a supply going to waste - you're taking it from a supply that would be fully utilized anyway.

>article

I remember it was a Twitter rant

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18954018

You can do that but most home cooks don't make soups or sauces from scratch and don't know how.

Home cooks may not, but industry does.

The subject is wasted food at home.

The subject of this thread is ugly fruit and vegetables. They don't make it into the grocery store, let alone all the way to ones home (in fresh form).

Which has nothing to do with my comment to the poster.

I think the issue there is ugly produce that makes it to the supermarket. After some period of not selling, the supermarket needs to dispose of it.

Soups are how I prevent food from wasting.

Usually I use a store-bought broth or soup mix, but the other 3/4 is stuff that may soon go bad, but will survive another extra week after a good boil.

Carrots seem like a poor example, they are literally meant to store over winter.

Lettuce? Id struggle to eat 3lb of lettuce before it went off.

if we want to reduce waste switching to frozen instead of fresh would help. most wastage occurs on market shelves anyway. many foods are more nutritious when kept frozen until consumption. most even. but I have no answer for the aesthetics or texture.

Frozen lettuce?

true, I think I have had a frozen mix with arugula, but i think your point is that going frozen means giving up fresh salads an the like, which is both true and a sacrifice

We do this with bread: but fresh and immediately freeze half.

Leafy vegetables can be thrown into a stir fry or soup and kept a bit longer after being cooked. (Same principle: eat fresh at the beginning).

That 3lb is 90% water anyway.

root vegetables keep longer raw, do greens keep longer cooked? I wish someone would sell freeze dried greens and roots. we wouldn't ship around that water and it would keep forever with no refrigeration. drop it in the stew and go

You can get a dried veg and bean mix for stews in the UK, it isn't what i would describe as nice though.

What is AOV? I've observed the same thing with groceries here in the UK too, and never understood how it benefits the supermarkets.

AOV = average order value

I believe it to also be caused by the huge amount of subsidies American farmers receive from the US government, pretty much incentivizing them to grow and sell as much food as they possibly can.

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