Making the World a Better Place One Ugly Vegetable at a Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2nSECWq_PE

            I encourage everyone to check out this video to see an excellent way to reduce the amount of food thrown away each year. This year a supermarket chain in France, called Intermarché, began buying and selling all the produce that its farms usually throw away due to irregularities in shape and color. They have named it the Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables Campaign, and are now selling this produce at 70% of the cost of regular produce that normally stocks the shelf.     

   

            The campaign has been very successful so far, and is doing a great job of (i) reducing food waste by these salvaging fruits and vegetables, and (ii) showing consumers that these weird looking fruits and vegetables are perfectly fine. The carrot with two legs tastes just like any other carrot. The orange with that weird looking hole in it--it's not from a worm, you can still eat it or squeeze fresh orange juice. Educating people that this produce is just as good, better said, exactly the same as all the other produce in the store has been the most important aspect of the campaign. It has already begun to make a positive impact on consumers' buying habits. As this campaign grows, more and more people will be apt to buy produce in whatever shape/form; appearance will not matter anymore. As a result, we can hope that produce providers will stop throwing it away and begin including it in their normal shipments to supermarkets. 

            The most obvious long-term effect we could see is that less food would be wasted. Also, produce prices will be cheaper. At the moment of the video, the inglorious fruits and vegetables were sold at a cheaper price because Intermarché was able to acquire them at a significantly lower cost, because they were "defective" products. Looking ahead, if these fruits and vegetables were incorporated in harvests as any other "perfect" fruit and vegetable, then sellable harvest would be much larger. In the same way that if a harvest of tomatoes is very small because late blight took its toll that season, then the price of tomatoes will be high to account for the loss. And vice versa, if a harvest is exceptionally good, then prices can drop because of the abundance of tomatoes. So, stopping the waste of all these good fruits and vegetables is one very easy way to ensure more plentiful harvests and produce at a more affordable price.