Viewpoint: The rejected vegetables that aren’t even wonky

Tonnes of perfectly good food are thrown away in the UK every year. Why, asks Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

I've witnessed some pretty grim scenes in the food business down the years - appalling conditions in the poultry industry, crazy EU fishing laws, all kinds of greed and folly.

Root vegetables may be a touch harder to feel for than chickens or fish. But watching 20 tonnes of freshly dug parsnips consigned to the rubbish heap in a Norfolk farmyard - purely because they didn't look pretty enough - is still one of the most shocking things I've ever seen.

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.

Read more here.

Who you callin' ugly? Join the campaign to end food waste now!

A petition calls on Whole Foods and Wal-Mart to start selling ugly produce instead of throwing it away -- an act that can benefit everyone.

It’s time to stand up for the uglies! Supermarkets have long discriminated against any fruits and vegetables that do not meet the absurdly high cosmetic standards for sale, with an estimated 26 percent of all produce in the United States tossed before it’s even given a chance on the shelves.

This makes no sense because ‘ugly’ produce is just as nutritious as attractive produce, and can even have more taste. In a world where there is so much concern about food shortages, greenhouse gas emissions from teeming landfills, water conservation, and dietary health, it’s only logical to embrace the uglies and welcome them into our food system.

Jordan Figueredo of the End Food Waste campaign has launched a petition to get Wal-Mart and Whole Foods to change their outdated policies on ugly produce and save billions of pounds of perfectly good fruits and vegetables from unnecessary rejection. He wants them to launch fun publicity campaigns, similar to France’s very successful Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables, the United States’ Imperfect Produce, and Canada's Naturally Imperfect line.

Read more here.