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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Grade your onions and sell the top 10% at a premium!

I sincerely believe that our society would be much happier and healthier if top-shelf/"celebrity" vegetables existed that could cost $XX, sort of like in Japan.

Someone would probably pay $1000+ for "The best dozen onions of the season"

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It's the opposite that's a bigger problem, a lot of all fruit and vegetables are thrown away because they're not perfect looking.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/us-food-...

I think that increasing the unit price of produce would reduce pressure on farmers to optimize for volume. A lot of the waste is a result farmers optimizing volume over nutritional quality because the market doesn't really have a place for "top-shelf" produce currently.

Vegetables can vary by an order of magnitude in nutritional density based on growing and harvest conditions. I wish there was a way to pay 10x for vegetables that are reliably 10x more nutritionally dense (as verified by laboratory analysis of random samples from every harvest).

"You eat with the eyes first" is a common cross-cultural idiom. I'm not saying it justifies the waste, just that it's probably an evolved human behavior that we're stuck catering to. At least there is a counter-culture ugly produce movement right now.

My knucklehead friend, who I grew up with, keeps insisting I ship the onions in a heavy wooden crate, for aesthetic value. He says I could upsell that "value-add". I've yet to implement that idea.

I was thinking something more like handcrafted artisanal compost, extra row spacing, daily weeding and hand watering? Kobe-beef of onions.

What could make an onion beautiful enough to buy for $100/ea? If you made these, I bet you'd find a market in Japan. Could make a good gift for people who like cooking.

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