Waste like this is basically a symptom of an inefficient logistics network and market conditions.<p>The fresh fruit you see at the grocery store all "made the cut" what didn't make the cut became canned tomatos, apple concentrate, frozen hash browns and other more processed fruits. Nobody cares if a canned tomato looks lumpy.<p>The problem is that the opportunities to redirect produce that doesn't pass QC are basically nonexistent after a pretty early part of the supply chain. Supply chain logistics are a mostly solved problem. This won't be fixed until the benefit outweighs the cost. The cost will most likely have to decrease for that to happen. A complicating factor is that produce optimized for one track (e.g. fresh apples) might perform more poorly if repurposed after failing QC (e.g applesauce) so in some situations it makes more sense to just discard stuff that doesn't pass QC late in the supply chain than to redirect it into role it's not optimized for.<p>If it was more profitable to redirect stuff that doesn't pass QC then people would do it. Many restaurants already dispose of food waste separately and give it to pig farms. Pig farmer reduces feed cost and the restaurant reduces disposal costs.
"The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry"<p>I mean, you can make a case for damaging the environment, but the thrown away food is hardly the reason people are hungry. We clearly don't have a shortage problem.
"I would say at times there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle" One of these is waste, one not. Perhaps their definition of waste needs to be reviewed.
Wow. I started growing my own vegetables a few years ago, and of course, I eat everything that I can successfully produce. However, I'm always struck by how much different my own tomatoes (for example) look than the ones that I can buy at the grocery store - mine are usually smaller, and cracked in a couple of places, but still perfectly edible. It made me wonder what "professional" farmers do with similar produce - I always assumed that they sold it to companies that made tomato sauce or something and sold the better ones to consumers. I never thought they'd throw away perfectly good vegetables.
For thousands of years people ate produce that often had unevenly-colored skins, but tasted good.<p>Food industry corporations have persuaded most people to instead eat produce that looks perfect but tastes worse. And they tell us that is progress.
Food production should not be subsidized, and environmental negative externalities forced into prices, via taxes eg. (Ys, this would have to be compensated with more income transfers for the poor)
>> Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill,<p>Only one of those I would call "thrown away". Left in the field to "rot" is a form of fertilizer. Being fed to livestock, animals that would otherwise eat something else, equally isn't waste. These are products being put to good uses, perhaps not the most lucrative uses for which they were designed, but uses nonetheless. This is farmers recycling unmarketable product. It isn't waste.<p>Only when product winds up as landfill, that is waste.
> <i>scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest.</i><p>So what? Most plants on the planet's surface are "abandoned in the field".<p>Where I live, there are vast areas of blackberry bush. Most of it is not picked by humans. Oh, the annual waste!<p>These vegetables will help fertilize the next crop. It's just not yield-efficient use of the agricultural surface area, that's all.<p>There is an opportunity for someone who can figure out how to grow perfect vegetables: they can make as much profit using a small fraction of the farm size.
I would say 10%-15% is lost to insurance fraud. A lot of times when the crop yield is less than 50% of expected yield farmers will just disc the fields and claim 100% loss.