Grab that sad, single banana and take it home – but don’t forget to eat it

By The Sydney Morning Herald · Last updated June 4, 2022  · 3 min read

Read it straight from The Sydney Morning Herald here.

We’ve all let half a loaf of bread grow mouldy, or purged our fridge of too many spoiled vegies. But you might be shocked by just how much produce we let wither and decompose.

Good Weekend editor Katrina Strickland certainly was. “If food waste was a country it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the US and China,” she says, introducing the latest episode of Good Weekend Talks. “And the UN estimates that 17 per cent of global food production is wasted, totalling almost 1 billion tonnes a year.”

The amount of food Australia throws away each year would, in fact, fill the MCG 10 times over. And we outperform other countries in what we throw away. But there are innovative minds trying to solve this problem. That much was detailed in our featured story this week, “Waste not want not” by freelance food writer Dani Valent, who joined us on the podcast.

“How can we be more frugal, more economical?” Valent asks. “When we’re shopping, can we not buy as much? When we’re eating out, should we not be over-ordering?” There’s an onus on everyone. “Households are the biggest culprit in the end,” she says. “We can blame the farms. We can blame the supermarkets. We can blame the supply chain. But in the end, the buck really stops with us at home.”

Yet there are chefs and bartenders, suppliers and tech wizards all trying to make a difference in this space. One of them, Joshua Ball, the co-founder of imperfect produce distributor Farmers Pick, which works directly with growers to source unwanted (ill-shapen, over-ripe, spotted or small) fruit and vegies and sell them direct to consumers.

“About a third of the volume of food that’s wasted is just left on the farm,” Ball says. “It never gets out the farm gates – it’s left to rot in the orchard.” He and his best mate and co-founder, Josh Brooks-Duncan, came up with the idea of harnessing this unused produce after an epiphany while walking through a farmer’s market. “I noticed the carrots weren’t plasticky or dead straight – things were a little bit big, a little bit small, and it didn’t really matter. No one really puts much onus on the shape or the size: not if they’re fresh.”

For the full feature story, see Saturday’s Good Weekend, or visit The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

Easy wins: imperfect produce – the perfect solution to food waste

By Rafqa Touma · Last updated Tueesday 4 January 2022

Read it straight from The Guardian here.

Save money, reduce waste and eat more plants – a subscription for fine-but-odd fruit and veg kicks a lot of goals.

While 5 million Australians go hungry each year, an estimated 7.3m tonnes of food is wasted. In Australia, up to 25% of all vegetables produced never leave the farm, often because they are too oddly shaped for the grocery store.

All the while, these reject fruits and vegetables – also known as “imperfect produce” – remain perfectly good to eat.

Melbourne households now have a new way to slash the weekly grocery budget. A local start-up company is home delivering farm fresh produce at drastically discounted prices, all because supermarkets think it’s ugly.

By 7News · Last updated 5 July 2021