{"id":357,"date":"2009-12-19T22:57:26","date_gmt":"2009-12-20T03:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/?p=357"},"modified":"2010-01-04T16:59:21","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T21:59:21","slug":"not-pretty-enough-why-we-throw-away-half-our-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/?p=357","title":{"rendered":"Not Pretty Enough: Why We Throw Away Half Our Food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>by Nancy Macdonald, MACLEANS.CA, November 9, 2009 <\/em><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/dreamstime_3298221.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px\" title=\"dreamstime_3298221\" src=\"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/dreamstime_3298221_thumb.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"dreamstime_3298221\" width=\"106\" height=\"159\" align=\"left\" \/><\/a> We throw out, at great environmental cost, a horrific amount of the food we grow. Why?<\/p>\n<p>Four years ago, North America\u2019s potato growers formed a cartel. By managing supply, and keeping demand\u2014and prices\u2014high, 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\u2014a 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\u2019 open-market returns soared\u2014up 49 per cent over the previous year.<\/p>\n<p>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 pro\ufb01t: aesthetics. <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2009\/11\/09\/what-a-waste\/\" target=\"_blank\">[Read rest of story]<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- tags used to go here --><\/div>\n<p><!-- tags used to go here --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We throw out 50 per cent of the food we produce, mostly because it isn&#8217;t &#8216;pretty&#8217; enough. In a hungry world, why do we do this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[120,164,117,165,122,167,121,119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}