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The wasteful fate of a third of food

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  1. [2]
    NaraVara
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    There was a long twitter thread from some food logistics person a while ago ranting about these services (which I can't find because social media is shit at helping you find anything you've seen...

    There are a growing number of initiatives like Oddbox and a mental exercise helps to explain why they exist. Imagine you’re in a supermarket, in front of the papaya stand. Two fruits capture your attention and they both look irresistible, but upon closer inspection you notice one has a weird lump that breaks its even skin. Although perfectly edible, it does look a bit freaky. Which one would you choose for tomorrow’s breakfast?

    There was a long twitter thread from some food logistics person a while ago ranting about these services (which I can't find because social media is shit at helping you find anything you've seen before) [edit: found it!]. Basically she said these "oddbox" type services are stupid and the modern food industry/grocery stores are actually extremely good at salvaging and repurposing ugly produce. The tomatoes that don't look good on a shelf get made into sauce or peeled and put into cans. The ugly eggplants get breaded and fried into eggplant parmesan. The fruits get made into pies and tarts. The produce that got damaged while on the shelf get cut up and sold as assorted fruit cups, pre-chopped onions, etc.

    So these services actually end up being pretty wasteful. Grocery stores have much better economies of scale at figuring out how to repurpose them and a strong economic incentive to figure out new ways to do it too. In fact, if anything their incentive is to be too willing to repurpose bad food, and some unscrupulous stores will do shady things like using moldy fruit for those mixed fruit cups.

    The idea to just get a random box of produce works out better if you join a CSA or farmshare without the conceit of giving orphaned pears a loving home or whatever. The Community Supported Agriculture model is basically a farmshare where people buy into a share of a local farmer's produce and the farmer sends each of them a box of whatever they've harvested that week. It's the same deal where you get a bunch fo random foods, but it's through some local farm instead of being cleared through a wholesaler middleman.

    As for the article's main point about food waste, I'd say the big culprit is probably just the absence of a food culture that's connected to how the food is produced. Back in the day people had much less variety in foods that were available to them, but they could do tons of things with the products they had and knew how to make it last. This is kind of what "home economics" was supposed to teach you, how to manage a pantry.

    We have a tendency to just treat food products as individual SKUs rather than part of the "lifecycle" of produce. Greek yogurt is a great example. Traditionally, yogurt was something people did when they had more milk than they could reasonably drink before it went bad. It was a strategy for making milk last and keeping it from going to waste so they would keep some fresh milk as milk and then reserve some part for making yogurt and cheese, which would keep longer and people would figure out all sorts of things to do with the byproducts to figure out how to make the most of what they have.

    But now people just know that "Greek yogurt is good for you" but since it's not part of the American food culture they have no conception of how it relates to milk. So we end up producing a ton of Greek yogurt, but there is no market for any of the other milk products and they go to waste.

    In other words, the waste is probably less a problem of people being choosy or lazy and more a problem of a faddish food culture that completely divorces the foods being eaten from how those foods are made. This is the real bonus of the "eat local" trend. Claims about carbon efficiency from reduced shipping distances were always dubious, but it was more about cultivating a sensitivity to things like seasonality and really understanding where the foods you eat come from, how they work, and how the environment affects them.

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    1. [2]
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      1. NaraVara
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        This can be a bit misleading. A lot of "cosmetic" standards are actually necessary to ensure shelf stability or surviving transit. Irregular shapes might not fit into containers and make them...

        For instance, a study of export supply chains from Peru to North America and Europe found that, on average, cosmetic specifications resulted in approximately 10 percent of production going to waste for crops under review.

        This can be a bit misleading. A lot of "cosmetic" standards are actually necessary to ensure shelf stability or surviving transit. Irregular shapes might not fit into containers and make them prone to being crushed or bruised, if the skin is broken is makes it more likely to mold or rot in transit, etc. It's hard to say how much is truly just cosmetic and how much is shipping and shelf stability considerations. They tighten standards when there is oversupply, but the culprit there seems to be oversupply moreso than the cosmetic standards. If you have the luxury of being choosy at the same price, of course you'll choose the nicer looking stuff. The stuff was going to be wasted anyway, so it's more about deciding which ones should go to waste at that point.

        Even the NRDC paper seems to imply the issue in grocery stores is again one of oversupply rather than being overly concerned with the prettiness of the produce:

        A survey of supermarket business leaders estimated
        that 10 percent of revenue is lost to spoilage, age dating, package damage, and markdowns, and that large national chains lose closer to 15 percent of revenue.
        .
        Part of the allure of supermarkets is that they carry a vast array of products at every hour of the day—usually between 15,000 and 60,000 items. While convenient, this bounty presents a challenge for forecasting and inventory management and inevitably leads to waste.
        .
        Furthermore, many retail stores operate under the assumption that customers buy more from brimming, fully stocked displays. This leads to overstocking and overhandling by both staff and customers and damages items on the bottom with the accumulated weight.
        Overstocked displays are a problem in store delis and seafood cases as well as in produce sections. By one account, 26 percent of whole fish are not sold, yet, they are steadily stocked because stores like how they look in display cases.

        That last paragraph does seem to be cosmetic, but it's not the cosmetics of any individual food so much as the cosmetics of wanting to have shelves that are always full.

        And the other big thing just seems to be impatience:

        As with produce, store managers often feel compelled to ensure these displays remain fresh and fully stocked. Rotisserie chickens, for instance, might be thrown away and replaced after four hours on display. One grocer estimated that his store threw away a full 50 percent of its rotisserie chickens, including many from the last batch of the day.

        So instead of making them to order, they prefer to have them available on the shelf and toss them if they don't sell. And, evidently, despite the fact that this means you're probably functionally paying for 2 rotisserie chickens each time you buy one, it still only costs like, $6. That seems insane to me. INSANE!

        Edit: I found the twitter thread and updated the first post with it.

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