A certain type of moment occurs in the produce section of a supermarket, usually around six o’clock in the evening, when the lights are bright, and the apples appear eerily alike. A shopper, such as a woman in her thirties carrying a basket, picks up an apple, turns it in her hand, and replaces it after noticing a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. She chooses another. And one more. She eventually locates the one who has no marks at all. She probably doesn’t realize that she just carried out the most significant ritual in contemporary food economics when she puts it in her basket and walks away.
What is grown, what is harvested, and what is buried are all being subtly altered by that ritual, which is multiplied by billions of hands in thousands of stores. The FAO has long stated that the loss of produce is greater than the loss of any other food category, with about 45% of all fruits and vegetables produced worldwide being wasted at some point in the supply chain. Much of that waste has nothing to do with nutrition, taste, or safety. It has to do with appearance. A scarred apple does not pose a threat. It’s just an apple that didn’t make it through a beauty pageant that no one intentionally agreed to judge.
Carrots clearly convey the narrative. Twenty-five to thirty percent of them never make it to a grocery store because they are too small, slightly off-color, bent, or have what packers kindly refer to as “character.” With the cool efficiency of a passport control officer, some are scanned by photographic sensors that search for aesthetic flaws. A bent carrot ends up in the livestock feed pile or sometimes in a landfill because it is nutritionally identical to its neighbor that is ready for the shelf. A single tomato requires 13 liters of water to grow, and an orange requires roughly 50 liters; in the case of rejected produce, these resources are wasted. Fuel, fertilizer, seeds, land, and the labor of farmers who might never be compensated for crops that never find a buyer make the figures even worse.
| Subject | Details |
|---|---|
| Focus | The role of cosmetic standards in driving global food waste |
| Estimated Global Produce Waste | Up to 45% of all fruits and vegetables |
| Food Waste Share in Developed Economies | Around 40% never eaten (NRDC data) |
| Carrots Rejected for Appearance | 25–30% before reaching retail |
| Water Cost, One Tomato | Approximately 13 litres |
| Water Cost, One Orange | Around 50 litres |
| Dominant Consumer Bias | “Beauty-is-good, ugly-is-risky” |
| Notable Initiatives | Intermarché’s “Inglorious Fruits,” Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods |
| UN Sustainability Target | 50% reduction in global food waste by 2030 |
| Hidden Cost | Lost water, land, labor, fuel, and rising landfill methane emissions |
The fact that the aesthetic pressure is not coming from a single villain is what makes this both fascinating and annoying.
The supply chain is eating itself. Produce is rejected by retailers because they think customers prefer consistency. Because they have been conditioned by decades of immaculate displays to associate beauty with quality and imperfection with risk, consumers reject the occasional imperfect item. This bias has been aptly named by researchers: “beauty-is-good, ugly-is-risky.” According to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers unconsciously believe that a misshapen bell pepper is more likely to be contaminated, older, or less nutritious, even when they are shown evidence to the contrary. Usually, the evidence does not prevail. The stomach does.
Strangely, and somewhat ironically, food that is aesthetically pleasing is more likely to be wasted during the actual consumption process. Research on plate waste, or food that is actually served to customers but is left uneaten, has revealed that once a dish is beautifully plated, diners are more likely to stop eating it. A perfectly cut piece of salmon with a forkful missing, a carefully arranged salad that has been disturbed, a half-eaten cake with a smudge of frosting on the side. The food feels less appealing because of the aesthetic “decrement,” as researchers refer to it. Therefore, the expectation of beauty results in waste at the start of the chain, in the middle of the retail process, and once more at the very end, on the plate. That has a hint of dark humor.
It’s difficult not to question how we arrived at this point. My grandmother used to buy tomatoes from a vendor a generation ago. The vendor unloaded the tomatoes from a wooden crate onto a scale, and if one had a crack, she cooked it that night rather than the following day. No one threw it away. No one took pictures of it. The term “aesthetic” was not yet used to describe a cucumber. The emergence of massive supermarket chains in the postwar decades contributed to the gradual change, which was later accelerated by Instagram’s visual economy, where food started to serve a camera before a stomach. There is a new level of self-consciousness among chefs when they discuss plating. Restaurants create food that looks good in warm light. Nowadays, there is a slight pressure to look good even when cooking at home.
This has multiple layers of psychology. Researchers refer to this idea as “perceived coolness,” which may seem absurd until you see how powerful it is. Buying ugly produce is increasingly seen by younger consumers as a small act of rebellion, a way to show that they see through the system. This is especially true for those who grew up with climate anxiety as a background hum. This was exploited by Misfits Market in the US, Oddbox in the UK, and Intermarché’s well-known “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign in France. Sales subtly increased and the store saw more foot traffic than the 30% discount on misshapen produce could account for when Intermarché gave each ugly carrot a name and a slogan. People desired to take part in a reversal. There’s something real about the energy, but it’s still unclear if that reversal goes beyond a marketing moment.
Additionally, governments have been slow to act, though some are starting to. Retailers in France have been encouraged to sell imperfect produce. Even household scraps are weighed and charged under South Korea’s stringent food waste regulations. According to the NRDC, 40% of food in the US is never consumed—a statistic so high that it almost seems unreal. Food that rots in a landfill and releases methane into the atmosphere costs hundreds of billions of dollars to grow, process, and dispose of. In a way that the carrots never were, the math is ugly.
As this develops, it seems as though the aesthetic standard is slowly eroding. AI-based sorters are being used by farmers in Maharashtra to recover value where it was previously lost. Rejected broccoli and beans are being turned into patties by Polish processors, which have a higher carotenoid content than the attractive examples on store shelves. Families that would otherwise go hungry are fed by food banks in Berlin and Toronto that accept people with cosmetic defects. In ten years, the deformed tomato might become less of a shameful secret and more of a commonplace aspect of the food scene.
However, as is often the case, beauty may prevail. Fruit has nothing to do with the deeper problem. It’s about how we’ve conditioned ourselves to associate virtue with aesthetic smoothness—a habit that goes far beyond the produce section. It might be necessary to start with something smaller and more intimate in order to change what ends up on the plate: the instinct to look past the freckled apple for its perfect twin while standing in front of those bright lights.
