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Wonky carrots
United Kingdom
Monday 02 July 2007
Supermarkets require their veg to be washed, polished and of uniform shape and size. This leads to huge levels of waste, so what should we do?
Around 50% of all food that is grown on UK farms is wasted somewhere between the field and our plates. For vegetables, most of this waste happens because of the incredibly strict specifications that supermarkets now impose. The latest casualties of this culture of waste are Prince Charles and Patrick Holden at the Soil Association, whose carrots did not meet Sainsbury's quality specifications. This happened after the carrots had travelled from Gloucestershire and Wales to Peterborough for washing and grading. Patrick sent the rejected carrots to a successful and popular organic box scheme, River Nene, based at Peterborough. Although only 12% of the rejects were excluded from the boxes, their customers raved about the "wonky" carrots.
Supermarket carrots not only have to be of uniform shape and size, they are washed and polished before being sorted. This removes their ability to store, and obliterates the wonderful aroma of a fresh carrot and much of their superb taste. It also leaves them much more susceptible to fungal attack. So here we have an example of a centralised, industrialised system of packing and distribution of organic vegetables, which no longer meets the needs and expectations of the public. It makes it difficult or impossible for small family farms situated hundreds of miles away from the packing stations to supply supermarkets at all. The truth is that all supermarkets have concentrated on buying from fewer and fewer suppliers for their fresh foods. That includes vegetables, fruit and livestock products. This makes economic sense to them. They deal with fewer producers who in turn can drive down prices through economies of scale. Although transport costs are higher the cost of oil is still cheap enough to allow thousands of lorries to travel from one side of the country to the other and still remain economic for the supermarkets.
Around 50% of all food that is grown on UK farms is wasted somewhere between the field and our plates. For vegetables, most of this waste happens because of the incredibly strict specifications that supermarkets now impose. The latest casualties of this culture of waste are Prince Charles and Patrick Holden at the Soil Association, whose carrots did not meet Sainsbury's quality specifications. This happened after the carrots had travelled from Gloucestershire and Wales to Peterborough for washing and grading. Patrick sent the rejected carrots to a successful and popular organic box scheme, River Nene, based at Peterborough. Although only 12% of the rejects were excluded from the boxes, their customers raved about the "wonky" carrots.
Supermarket carrots not only have to be of uniform shape and size, they are washed and polished before being sorted. This removes their ability to store, and obliterates the wonderful aroma of a fresh carrot and much of their superb taste. It also leaves them much more susceptible to fungal attack. So here we have an example of a centralised, industrialised system of packing and distribution of organic vegetables, which no longer meets the needs and expectations of the public. It makes it difficult or impossible for small family farms situated hundreds of miles away from the packing stations to supply supermarkets at all. The truth is that all supermarkets have concentrated on buying from fewer and fewer suppliers for their fresh foods. That includes vegetables, fruit and livestock products. This makes economic sense to them. They deal with fewer producers who in turn can drive down prices through economies of scale. Although transport costs are higher the cost of oil is still cheap enough to allow thousands of lorries to travel from one side of the country to the other and still remain economic for the supermarkets.
