‘Ugly fruits and vegetables’ to be sold to combat waste

Walmart will give you the chance to buy ugly food.

…for Jordan Figueiredo, food waste activist and the human behind the @UglyFruitAndVeg social media campaign, a visit to Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas on Wednesday represented the culmination of more than a year’s worth of work. His mission? Deliver a petition, signed by more than 140,000 consumers, asking the nation’s largest supermarket chain to commit to selling “ugly” fruits and vegetables in an effort to curb food waste.

Food waste is a huge problem for both the United States and the world, with almost half of all the food produced ending up in landfills. That means that all of the inputs that go into growing, harvesting, and transporting food — the water, the gasoline, the hours of labor — are essentially wasted, costing the world billions of dollars in economic losses each year. Moreover, wasted food decomposes to release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is more effective, at least in the short term, at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, if the global emissions associated with food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind the United States and China.

 

 

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.