wasting food 6

I've previously written (a number of times) about wasting food.  Sweden's The Local (in English) has reported that Swedes throw away a large amount of food every year and malformed vegetables do not even reach human consumption stage.

Swedes throw away food for 20-40 billion kronor ($3-6 billion) every year and the food tossed aside by households, stores and restaurants is just the tip of the iceberg. A new report from the Swedish Board of Agriculture (Jordbruksverket) reveals that vegetables considered unattractive never even reaches stores.

"A lot of carrots get thrown away because of their looks, and that just feels completely wrong considering today's debate about the environment," carrot farmer Tanya Hultman, outside Piteå in northern Sweden, told The Local on Thursday.

Carrots that don't make the cut are among the unappealing foodstuff most often rejected, according to Sveriges Radio (SR). Too small, too crooked, too big - none of these vegetables will see grocery stores.

Hultman is disappointed by this blatant discrimination, pointing out that there's nothing wrong with the carrots apart from looking insufficiently appealing.

According to the Swedish Board of Agriculture, as much as a fourth of all the carrots farmed are rejected by stores.

The Local also reported that one third of all food produced is not even eaten. Read more.  Full report from Jordbruksverket, Hållbar konsumtion av jordbruksvaror linked here (pdf document in Swedish).

Surely, unattractive vegetables would have been used in food processing.  The high levels of food wastage in affluent nations is unacceptable given so many in the world have barely enough to eat.