Suzanne Goldenberg - Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests
Americans throw away
almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening
hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment. 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, because of unrealistic and unyielding
cosmetic standards, according to official data and interviews with dozens of
farmers, packers, truckers, researchers, campaigners and government officials.
From the fields and
orchards of California to the population centres of the east coast, farmers and
others on the food distribution chain say high-value and nutritious food is
being sacrificed to retailers’ demand for unattainable perfection.
“It’s all about
blemish-free produce,” says Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables
from North Carolina and central Florida. “What happens in our business today is
that it is either perfect, or it gets rejected. It is perfect to them, or they
turn it down. And then you are stuck.”
Food waste is often
described as a “farm-to-fork” problem. Produce is lost in fields, warehouses,
packaging, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants and fridges. By one government
tally, about 60m tonnes of produce worth about $160bn (£119bn), is wasted by
retailers and consumers every year - one third of all foodstuffs. But that is just a
“downstream” measure. In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers,
wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that
occurs “upstream”: scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save
the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse
because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality.
When added to the
retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce
grown, experts say. “I would say at times
there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle,” said Wayde
Kirschenman, whose family has been growing potatoes and other vegetables near
Bakersfield, California, since the 1930s. “Sometimes it can be worse.”
“Sunburnt” or
darker-hued cauliflower was ploughed over in the field. Table grapes that did
not conform to a wedge shape were dumped. Entire crates of pre-cut orange
wedges were directed to landfill. In June, Kirschenman wound up feeding a
significant share of his watermelon crop to cows.
Researchers
acknowledge there is as yet no clear accounting of food loss in the US,
although thinktanks such as the World
Resources Institute are working towards a more accurate reckoning.
Imperfect Produce, a
subscription delivery service for “ugly” food in the San Francisco Bay area,
estimates that about one-fifth of all fruit and vegetables are consigned to the
dump because they do not conform to the industry standard of perfection.
But farmers, including
Kirschenman, put the rejection rate far higher, depending on cosmetic slights
to the produce because of growing conditions and weather. That lost food is seen
increasingly as a drag on household incomes – about $1,600 a year for a family
of four – and a direct
challenge to global efforts to fight hunger, poverty and climate
change.
Globally, about
one-third of food is wasted: 1.6bn tonnes of produce a year, with a value of
about $1tn. If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic metre skips, it would
fill 80m of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon, and encircle it
once. Taking action to tackle this is not impossible, as
countries like Denmark have shown.
The world wastes 1.6bn tonnes of food every year… read more:
