Somewhere in central California, a bruised pear that no one wants is sitting on a loading dock. It only has a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. It tastes good. It was grown, picked, and packed by the farmer. After looking through a spec sheet, a buyer from a chain of supermarkets concluded it wasn’t attractive enough. It ends up in a composter, cattle feed, or occasionally the ground. You begin to grasp the peculiar, unsettling economics of what is eaten and what is not when you multiply that pear by a few billion.
That was meant to be fixed by the ugly food movement. It’s the notion that consumers should gladly purchase freckled apples, cucumbers with the wrong curvature, carrots with two legs, and radishes with two legs. This idea has been in the public eye for about ten years. They were referred to in advertising campaigns as “wonky,” “inglorious,” and “perfectly imperfect.” Jamie Oliver provided his face. Startups raised a substantial sum of money. And at some point, the whole thing became a heartwarming tale about preserving the environment one lumpy tomato at a time.
However, the more you dig, the more bizarre it becomes. According to the UN, food waste costs the economy about $1 trillion annually. The total rises to about $2.6 trillion when social and environmental costs are taken into account. These are the kinds of figures that economists trot out at conferences; they sound almost phony. However, the global food system continues to reject produce because of its appearance rather than its flavor. The waste would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world if it were a nation. It’s not a catchphrase. That’s just math.
However, the issue that the movement has subtly brought to light isn’t actually one of ugly veggies. The issue is who makes money off of the delusion that perfection is the norm. Supermarkets trained customers to expect identical apples stacked like pool balls by building their grading systems over decades. Farmers adjusted, then became resentful. A few years ago, Sarah Taber, a crop scientist, contended that packinghouses hardly ever discard edible fruit; instead, the most unsightly items are typically sold at low prices in lower-class areas. The narrative presented in the glossy subscription boxes is more flattering than that one. It’s also more accurate.
Beneath it all lies a more difficult question. What happens to the communities that food banks served when a Silicon Valley-funded startup intervenes and purchases the rejected crops that were previously given away for free? Imperfect Foods was accused of precisely that in 2018 by the nonprofit Phat Beets Produce: embezzling donations and reselling them to affluent clients. Both sides had a point when the company retaliated, which is another way of saying that no one’s hands were completely clean.
It’s difficult not to experience a twinge of both admiration and unease as you watch this play out. The conversation did shift as a result of the movement. Europe abandoned its ridiculous regulations regarding the curvature of cucumbers and the lengths of asparagus. Large retailers are prohibited from destroying unsold food in France. In Texas, Walmart conducted tests on ugly potatoes. Even Australia’s Woolworths now has an imperfect line, despite its modesty. Wins are tiny, dispersed, but genuine. The issue is that the headline story—a customer purchases an odd-looking apple, saving the planet—was never entirely truthful about the plumbing involved.
The reason the $1 trillion figure is helpful is that it is tidy. It includes the water sprayed on crops that were never consumed, the diesel burned while transporting them, and the labor paid for a crop that was never consumed. A trillion-dollar lie is not intentional. It’s what a system tells itself when it’s simpler to discard items than to reconsider their value. Even with the best of intentions, the unsightly produce box on your doorstep cannot solve that on its own. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to.
