441–450 of 488 posts
It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…
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> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. Citation needed. I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.
"Around 25 per cent of edible fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection or cosmetic damage every year in Australia. According to a 2013 study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)," https://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2014/12/10/woolworths-launche... Original source is somewhere in there - sorry for the laziness. Even without the citation I believe this and take it at face value. I'…
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I doubt you've got a good data stream about sell-by dates, tho - the old and new have the same UPC generally. Maybe OCR of sell by stickers? And this doesn't help things that don't have dates, like produce.
Dang, I figured that stuff would have been included in the barcode. There must be some way to track this automatically because I doubt stores are managing their inventory on tracking this manually in 2020.
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Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…
> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. This isn’t true at all. It’s literally a myth made up by people who want to sell ugly food to consumers. Ugly produce is used as animal food, sold to food service companies where it’s ugliness wont matter after they prepare it, or occasionally tilled back into the soil as fertilizer. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/182403…
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> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. Citation needed. I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.
"Around 25 per cent of edible fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection or cosmetic damage every year in Australia. According to a 2013 study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)," https://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2014/12/10/woolworths-launche... Original source is somewhere in there - sorry for the laziness. Even without the citation I believe this and take it at face value. I'…
The 25% number is not 25% of food produced, but 25% of the waste in the supply chain being on the consumer side. Nowhere that I can see in the 2013 study cited does the FAO make the claim that "fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection", that number also encompasses e.g. people overbuying produce that goes bad etc.
By the criteria of the article you're citing if the production & distribution part of the supply chain got more efficient that scary 25% number would rise. Indeed if you read the study this is what's happened in industrialized countries, we have a higher food waste percentage on the consumer side because we have more relative savings in the rest of the supply chain.
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That's like a perpetual motion machine. Energy is wasted, there is no way around it.
The sun is a great source of free energy.
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in a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell. Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or t…
Makes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either. The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to a…
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> Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks. And because arranging different pricing for all the foodstuffs that look less than perfect costs more than profit on these items, into the bin goes perfectly good food.
Apple juice is made from bruised apples. They have to get damaged late enough in the supply chain to get put on a shelf at all.
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> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. In London there's a startup which sells such rejected, ugly fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/ (no affiliation beyond being a happy customer)
Considering their stated purpose, the fruit and veg in their marketing are remarkably photogenic
I've only been receiving their boxes for a few weeks now, and gotten some strange J-shaped cucumbers, but most of the produce looks normal.