Farms aren’t tossing perfectly good produce. You are.

Farms aren’t tossing perfectly good produce. You are.

People don’t like to eat ugly fruit and it’s creating food waste.  According to the food waste experts at ReFED, less than 20 percent of total food waste in the United States happens at farms and packinghouses. More than 80 percent  is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants.

There are several companies that have made an industry out of selling ugly produce, and that’s a helpful solution, but it’s just one solution and it’s not enough to solve the problem.  And it is a problem because wasting food wastes all the resources it took to produce it – the water, the fertilizers, which often are created with fossil fuels, the labor and the land used to grow the food.

According to ReFED’s 2016 report, “A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste by 20 Percent,” the single biggest source of creating food waste in the United States, accounting for 43 percent, is our own homes and we have the ability to do something about it. We can change our shopping and eating habits to become more sustainable but perhaps the biggest behavioral change we can make of all is to eat what we bring home. Then there’s no waste involved, of food, of water, of any of the resources it took to produce that food in the first place.

[Washington Post]