16-10-2015 9:07 PM
What a great idea, I think.
Maybe the new generation of adults will have a healthier approach to food and sustainability too.
17-10-2015 1:12 PM - edited 17-10-2015 1:13 PM
I've had that site bookmarked for a long time now. Very refreshing to see heartwarming news stories when the main news headlines are so depressing.
Here's another encouraging trend where apparently the French have followed the UK's example, in trying to stop food wastage.
“Recent experience in the UK shows that selling wonky fruit and veg has enormous potential and is one of the easiest ways of dramatically reducing food waste in the supply chain,” she told Resource magazine. “In 2012 alone, 300,000 tonnes of fruit and veg were saved from being wasted due to UK retailers temporarily relaxing their cosmetic standards because of bad weather.
It has always grieved me to realise how much food we in the West throw away either because it doesn't look 100% or because we buy far too much then throw it away when it doesn't get eaten. Disgraceful behaviour when so many are starving elsewhere in the world.
17-10-2015 5:35 PM
I have some apple trees which have fruited well this year, one of them has fruit with some skin blemishes but. They taste fantastic.
The other thing you do not see publicised is the amount of food that is dumped because it is out of temperature on arrival at store or Warehouse.
17-10-2015 7:04 PM
I have only recently found that positive news site JD, after googling 'cheerful news' as I am so fed up with all the doom and gloom that makes up most of the news.
On that same site, I see that Asda are now selling wonky veg
http://positivenews.org.uk/2015/environment/food/17067/wonky-fruit-veg-hits-uk-supermarket-shelves/
and M&S is planning to supply surplus food to charities and food banks
It's about time that supermarkets tackled food waste problems in a positive way
17-10-2015 7:06 PM
@fallen-archie wrote:I have some apple trees which have fruited well this year, one of them has fruit with some skin blemishes but. They taste fantastic.
The other thing you do not see publicised is the amount of food that is dumped because it is out of temperature on arrival at store or Warehouse.
Is it common, do you think? As big a problem as wasted food not sold?
18-10-2015 3:31 PM
Many retailers allow 6% for shrinkage technically unknown stock loss a mix of theft and waste. The loss I mentioned is recorded and therefore figures are available. I'm sure it won't be as high as above but it is still a problem.
Btw how is your tropical allotment doing in your attic, have your neighbours noticed a jump in their leccy bill🌱😎
28-10-2015 7:02 PM
A 20 ton mountain of perfectly good parsnips just dumped thanks to irrational supermarket standards
I feel sorry for the hard-working food producers who will make a loss because of this madness
Hugh Fearnley-W said: As a chef, I can tell you there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. In fact, they were beautiful. I would have been delighted to cook with them. They may not have been perfectly straight, or utterly without blemish, or conformed to a robot's laser vision of a perfect parsnip. But they were all just great to me.
Yet the supermarket client found them wanting. They "failed" the "cosmetic standards". They weren't wonky, or forked, or bruised or even "ugly". They just departed, sometimes by a matter of millimetres, from some bizarre set of specifications that defines, with apparent omniscience, what it is that we, the customers, demand our parsnips to be. Not that anyone's asked us.
That's not just a few sackfuls of parsnips, it's not a skip-load. It's a colossal mountain of them - enough to fill nearly 300 shopping trolleys. And, more importantly perhaps, to feed 100,000 people with a generous portion of roast parsnips.
That was just one week's wastage. So multiply by the 40 or so weeks of parsnip season (September-May) to get the full annual figure - four million parsnip portions that could, but won't, get eaten.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34647454
28-10-2015 7:16 PM
I read that report earlier and thought it was complete madness.
"The supermarkets" have too much control over their suppliers and surely it's unfair practice?
Just a couple of incidents I know about, old, but they happened.
A grower was told by his buyer "We're giving two for one this week so you'll only get half your money". When the chap protested and said he'd sell his stuff else where he was told "You won't, read your contract".
A potato grower was persuaded by his buyer to invest in a sort of controlled environment (some sort of air conditioning?) so that he could keep his crop longer and get a better price as the countrywide stocks fell later in the Winter leading to a higher price.
That year was a bad year for potatoes in many places but as he had an excellent harvest on good ground his buyer wanted all his stock early in the Winter at the early price so he was cleaned out leaving him with the expensive machinery doing nothing and without the expected higher price to pay for it. He went bust.
I told the MD of a local chain about the "two for one" deal and he said that "they didn't expect suppliers to fund all the offer". That means they still expected a lower price?
It's life Jim, but not as WE know it.
Live long and prosper.
28-10-2015 7:21 PM
You beat me too it Susie, I was about to post that link myself. An absolutely disgraceful waste of good food. It seemed ok to sell such produce when bad weather affected harvests but now it's all gone back to the standard practice of dumping everything that isn't 100% perfect. The supermarkets seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what the public do or don't find acceptable and as HFW says......"not that anyone's asked us". What possible difference can the shape of a carrot or parsnip make to it's usefulness or saleability when most of us routinely cut them up before cooking and eating anyway.
A scandalous practice.
28-10-2015 8:04 PM
It is a joke that fruit and veg is constantly tampered with to provide higher yields, more colour, conformity of shape etc yet still tons get dumped. Give me proper food, natural food, food free from pesticides and what you can't eat yourself let our struggling wildlife enjoy.
One other fact HFW refers too is that the supermarkets whilst being major culprits are not alone, consumers also dump more and more food for being out of date and having purchased too much.
05-11-2015 9:07 PM
I saw the programme, though I was already familiar with the problems faced by farmers. HOWEVER, we as consumers also bear some culpability - we prioritise lower prices and convenience, and so choose to shop at large supermarkets who - to retain our customers - squeeze farmers more to keep up their own overall profit margins. It's like people in general bemoan the homogeneity of our high streets, but want cheaper prices so are less likely to shop at independents who have a far lower element of buying power than chains - we can't have it all.
The thing I found most shocking was the woman who was slinging eggs for being just out of date, who had never heard of the water test! Serisouly - she was older than me, I would think: and I have never *not* known that way of checking whether eggs are OK. I was suprised how much people waste- I had assumed the wastage was food going physically yucky as a result of not being used in time etc, but rather it was people throwing out perfectly good food based on a relatively arbitrary date! It's even more shocking as times are so hard at the moment - who on earth wants to be wasting that kind of money every week with no need?