Not Pretty Enough: Why We Throw Away Half Our Food

We throw out, at great environmental cost, a horrific amount of the food we grow. Why?

Four years ago, North America’s potato growers formed a cartel. By managing supply, and keeping demand—and prices—high, the United Potato Growers of America, which later helped found a Canadian counterpart, aims to be the OPEC of spuds. Within a year of forming, however, United was facing public revulsion: the consortium, it turned out, was asking farmers to destroy crops to boost prices. In a single year, the Idaho chapter took roughly four million 100-lb. bags of already harvested, perfectly good potatoes and plowed them right back into the ground—a legal, if disgusting, measure. It took one farmer three days to bury his share: $100,000 worth. In 2006 alone, United helped erase 6.8 million hundredweight potato sacks from the U.S. and Canadian markets. Farmers’ open-market returns soared—up 49 per cent over the previous year.

Response to this news was uniformly horrified, but the truth is, in much of the West, produce is destroyed every day of every week, on a much larger scale, and for a reason even more offensive than profit: aesthetics. [Read rest of story]