UK: Wonky fruit and veg: how much do we really waste?
In his new television series Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast, which begins tonight on Channel 4, the chef and his farmer friend Jimmy Doherty talked to growers who were unable to sell their “ugly” veg to supermarkets, leading to huge wastage.
The pair approached Asda, who have now agreed to sell the previously cast-off vegetables with the tagline “Beautiful on the inside”, for a 30 per cent discount in price.
The wastage of “ugly” fruit and veg has been a recurrent complaint of environmental campaigners over the past few years. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally (about 1.3 billion tons per year) while according to Wrap, the sustainability agency, each year 90,000 tonnes of produce in the UK is sent to landfill. Much of this is fruit and vegetables which as been rejected purely for aesthetic reasons: the Soil Association reckons that in the UK, a staggering 20-40 per cent of produce is rejected simply because it doesn't look quite right.
Consumers, however, aren’t as anti ugly-veg as the supermarkets might think. Research for Mintel carried out in June 2014 found that 48 per cent of shoppers would buy oddly-shaped fruit or vegetables if they were of good quality, while research done by Asda for their new campaign put this figure even higher, at 65 per cent.
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Source: telegraph.co.uk
