Food waste.

[medsec222]

I read somewhere that Morrisons were trying to sell then off at the price.

[Weka]

I get vege bags here. I get one every other week. But I have no say in what goes in it. But it's straight from the markets all local and seasonal.

I have to say when I came back home from the uk I thought all our fruit and veg in the shops looked horrible and second rate, but now it looks normal.

And now that I grow my own, it gets served up, even if the slugs got there first. They don't eat too much.

[Kaz]

We can get those delivered here too Weka, but not for £3.50

Medsec I will have a look tomorrow, when I go there!

[Workingman]

Meds and Kaz, the local Morrisons only does a small range of root veg: spud; carrots, parsnips sort of things.

The local Asda is not part of the deal as yet. It is still awaiting its delivery of goods and boxes.

Weka, I have used some farmers' markets recently and their veg is pretty wonky, a bit like the old days over here, but it tastes OK even if the cost is still fairly high.

[Suff]

I have worked in a veg packing facility, when I was at college. You would probably be interested to know the rules as to which veg gets packed at what point. The box (2 tonne), was tipped on the belt, Marks and Tesco got the first pick of the box and then we started filling the rest with Asda pretty low down.

However that veg had already been processed and washed. The stuff which never made it into the boxes was sorted between animal feed, pre packaged meal companies and then disposal. It was a Scottish firm so disposal was the last thing on their minds.

I also worked on a farm in Cambridgeshire where the worst potatoes went to the Crisp manufacturers but nothing went to waste.

It sounds to me like this farm they visited was a boutique type farm which was growing for the highest possible prices and not for bulk. In that case they wouldn't even care about whether they trashed £10,000 per week of low quality produce, as they would not make enough on it to be worth sorting out.

There is a lot not being said here which is that this farm was unlikely to be representative and that the veg they destroyed was not economical to their model. It also has a lot to say about where our pre packaged meals come from, because they don't care, when it is a cooked meal, what the shape of the veg is.

So, it could simply be that £10,000 a week prime prices, might be £1,000 a week bulk and they may have decided that composting is more time and cost efficient than selling it on.

Which is a hugely different picture than the face one..

[Kaz]

A lot of the veg was considerably reduced today in Morrisons, so I stocked up

[Workingman]

You are right, Suff, nothing can be taken at face value. However, the sub-text is still frightening. DEFRA, Wrap, the NFU and other interested parties all agree that something like 40% of all fruit and veg grown in the UK goes to compost or landfill... and that is after the food processors have taken out their share of the not-quite-up-to-standards produce. All of it is edible food.

It is almost the opposite of the livestock industry where every scrap of the animal acceptable to us consumers is removed, processed and then packaged back to us as "something like" xyz. The rest goes to animal feed. Anything that cannot be used is incinerated, and that now includes hides and skins.

On top of that we are importing things we grow and then throw away. A walk around the supermarket yesterday and there were apples from Chile, France, Spain and NZ, with potatoes and onions form Egypt and Israel. It's bonkers.

In one episode last year onions - too big or too small - were left in the ground to decompose and then ploughed back in. One farm growing mainly carrots and parsnips had tried to cut waste by doing its own sorting before sending the goods off to the local food cooperative (Not the Co-op) in order to get the best price. The yard was full of skips they knew would not make the grade. The operation closed this year.

[Aggers]

I once had a tour of a fruit factory in the Vale of Evesham, and saw the workers
working on a conveyer belt sorting out any damaged or rotten fruit before it was
sent to the canning process. When I asked what happened to the rejected fruit, I
was told, "That all goes into the jam making department".

It's a pity that this sort of thing can't be done with regard to vegetables, Isn't it ?

[Suff]

And don't even begin to get me started on the EU subsidy waste.....

Back when we lived on the edge of a farm in FIFE, the farmers were paid to produce product which was to be destroyed. Mountains of cauliflowers sitting in the field waiting to be destroyed, paid for by the EU... We had a lot of cauliflower soup that year....

When production to waste is sanctioned by the government, why should they even bother with worrying about it generally?