Anyone with a backyard garden knows that vegetables often don’t look like the meticulously laid-out produce you see in grocery stores: cucumbers aren’t always straight carrots can be multi-pronged and peppers can come off the vine in a number of hilarious and often borderline obscene shapes.
When misshapen veggies come out of our home gardens we usually laugh maybe post a photo on Instagram and then go ahead and eat them. Why aren’t we so lighthearted when it comes to buying deformed vegetables in our supermarkets?
About 20 per cent of farm-grown produce and five to eight per cent of greenhouse vegetables fall into the “too weird looking to sell in a store” category meaning that producers are left to try to sell them to food processors restaurants or other less-picky customers. When that fails (and the supply does exceed the demand) they’re forced to just throw them out.
In response to the European Unions’s declaration of 2014 as the European Year Against Food Waste French food retailer Intermarché released a viral video promoting their “Inglorious Fruits” campaign earlier this year in which misshapen produce was offered at a discounted price. As it turned out the French were perfectly happy to buy gnarly looking produce and the campaign was a huge success.
After seeing Intermarché’s success Alberta’s Red Hat Co-operative — which produces much of the local produce you’ll find in major grocery chains — has followed suit with a new program called “The Misfits.” Beginning with eight stores in Calgary (four Co-ops and four Safeways) Red Hat will set up special displays of flawed English cucumbers mini cucumbers tomatoes and bell peppers all marked down 30 per cent of the regular price.
“I don’t believe that consumers have made the choice that they don’t want these products — I think that they’ve had it made for them and don’t even realize that a cucumber doesn’t have to be straight and have a consistent width” says Red Hat’s Mike Meinhardt. “Once they start hearing about the program and seeing the product I think that consumers will be happy to buy a cucumber that’s curved at a 90 degree angle because they’re just chopping it up and putting it in a salad anyway.”
While the folks at Red Hat are happy to offer customers healthy produce at a discount their main goal is to reduce waste. Misshapen fruits and vegetables only account for a fraction of Canada’s wasted food so The Misfits program will only take a small dent out of that but the co-operative hopes that when people knowingly buy a vegetable that was destined for the compost pile they’ll make a point of actually eating it rather than letting it rot in the fridge.
“We’d like to take a more global look at food waste in Canada and use this as an entry point to get people talking about it” Meinhardt says. “For every man woman and child in Canada there’s about 250 pounds of food waste a year. About 50 per cent of that happens in people’s homes. So we want to highlight that and talk about what people can do by buying and accepting this product but then also stop and think about what they’re doing at home.”
