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