Fork Full Of Noodles with Krish Mohan-174-The Looks Of Your Fruit

At least 43% of Food Waste is caused by perfectly edible food being tossed out by consumers based on looks. We discard more food based on looks rather than taste. But we can get around that, watch for more!

Written, Edited & Filmed by Krish Mohan

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Think about a banana. What are you picturing? Is it a long, spotted, yellow fruit? Is it your favorite level from Mario Kart? Is it a penis? This is one of the things that contributes to the global food waste problem. This mystical idea of what things should look like. Well, if you thought of a dick there might be small chance that you don’t waste as much food as you do masturbate to them and/or possibly also have a sex addiction problem.

40% of food we are supposed to eat goes to waste. Part of this is because there are issues in the distribution pipeline. Now consumers are part of this problem. In the states 43% of what is wasted is because of the consumers! 1 in 8 people go hungry, which a large problem. That’s 12.5% by the way. These are all failing grades in terms of egalitarian societies! Which means for an advanced society we’re pretty remedial in how we feed ourselves.

Ok, so I get that percentages and fractions are not in the American vocabulary. We’re trying to deport those words out with 11.6 million undocumented workers that pick the food that ends up wasted. It would be something if the people wasting that food were doing as an avant garde protest against a misunderstood Immigration system, but I think that Venn Diagram is far too small to contribute a solution to a problem this large.

Since we can’t really figure out how to visualize percentages, let’s talk in terms that we all can understand….money. In America one family of 4 wastes about $1500 worth of food per year! And this isn’t just an American problem. Canadians waste about $31 billion worth of food a year. Australians are at $5.2 billion worth of food, which is larger than their military budget! 

That means in Australia, your need to throw away icky fruits outweighs your need to kill. Its ok, Americans will carry the weight of dominating with violence for yah Australia. You keep throwing away that goofy looking clementine, and then we’ll shoot it so it doesn’t hurt anyone ever again.

But that’s how we the consumers dictate the market especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables. A wonky looking apple or orange will not bought. And since the consumers are determining what should be kept in the grocery stores, they determine what the grocers buy from farmers. So farmers are now throwing away “ugly” produce. This inefficiency in the distribution pipeline is a result of our own vanity. 

So let’s take a look at how this Aesthetically pleasing inefficiency works. On farms in the United Kingdom, farmers have to make a third more of produce because they might miss an “ugly” fruit or something might touch the ground for a second. Over a quarter of bananas globally are discarded because they don’t look pretty enough or they’ve touched the ground for a second. This is the same way basic bitches judge men’s penises, which results in a quarter basic men not getting their dick wet.

It’s interesting that we freak out when an apple touches the ground, but we’re just fine with a bunch of cancer causing agents to be sprayed on that same apple. It’s the 5 second rule of the mindless consumer! It takes 5 seconds of pesticide spray for the fruit to be ruined forever, but yeah, let’s worry about if it has made contact with the earth from whence it came.

So what happens to all the fruit that didn’t make the cut. They either plough them back into the fields to use as fertilizer for next year, or they feed it to livestock! We have to feed to livestock because they don’t understand what beauty is. They just look at piece of fruit and say “Hey look free energy! Wow! This is such great concept. Just free food and energy for me to live my life and hangout with some pals….What’s that metal thing?!”

Seldom does this discarded fruit supply get to a Food Bank or to the 1 in 8 Americans that need to eat. And large part of that is because grocery stores and farms don’t want to invest in donation because it’s one more step to make the effort to get this food to the people that need it. Pull yourself up by the your bootstraps corporate North America and do the right thing and feed the world like you keep claiming you want to! Be the change you pretend to agree with.

Look if you eat at any fast food place, you should not be picky about the looks of your produce. Not one fast food place has food that looks like their photographs. This is how bad this trend of making everything pristine is! Not only are we airbrushing and photoshopping our actresses and famous people, but we’re doing to our food. No wonder people think of penises when I say banana, because thanks to Fast Food restaurants airbrushing our burgers to beauty, we’re conditioned to want to fuck our food.

Now let’s move to all our favorites. The corporations. In 2016 the Canadian Broadcasting Company ran an expose on this issue. So we of course start with Walmart. Walmart is one of the largest grocers in the world, which is probably most disgusting sentence I’ve ever uttered, and I’ve read comments from porn videos aloud! Humanity really has an abusive relationship with Walmart. They have lower prices but they also have the lowest morality.

Now in this CBC report from 2016 they show you how much food goes waste behind a Canadian Walmart! And that’s in Canada! They’re being generous, so American Walmart’s probably have a full landfills worth of wasted food. I would not be surprised if most of the landfills in the world are owned by Walmart. Which makes sense since the Waltons are the Landfills of Humanity.

And this is human rights abuse. Most of Walmart’s employees get paid so bad they’re under poverty line and they have to throw away food that can feed their families and like 8 others! The only way this could be more cruel is if they made the employees throw it away in front of a Food Bank! But that would show how unaesthetically pleasing the insides of the Waltons minds really is! And this is economy run on fake niceness & blind complacency so I’m sure the Walmart consumer would be overly conflicted.

Now after CBC contacted Walmart about their food waste problem, Walmart locked up their trash bins. This should come to no shock. Once it was revealed how terribly they treat and pay their employees they caged up a livable wage too.  

In the UK 85% of the produce is bought by grocery stores so they determine how much the farmers grow in order for us buy shit. And this responsibility does really fall on the grocer and the consumer! You think a farmer wants to put all that effort into bringing life into this world only to have thrown away or fed to cows or buried like the worst and most delicious treasure known to man? So it should be our responsibility be look at the quality and taste of the food instead of this shallow attitude towards our food. And that might get grocers to change their minds.

So why is it that we as consumers need to have things look so damn beautiful all the time? We value the outward appearance of things so much despite the inefficiencies it creates. Think about it…each morning we all do our best look aesthetically pleasing to tell the world we are ok. Put our 3 piece suit or clean jeans, do our makeup, precisely deshevle our hair. All of this takes so much time each morning that we wake up earlier than we need to and are too tired to do our jobs, or are chronically late for work.

But this clean, precise, beauty is everywhere. The visual of the Apple corporation is clean, square and organized. The way we view beauty is to use organization to make sense of a chaotic world. But that’s not what the world is. Instead of masking the chaos with straight crisp lines, or perfectly red apple or make up, why not use the entropy of chaos to our advantage. Use the chaos to create something truly beautiful instead of something inorganic and lifeless.