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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Very little produce actually goes to waste... What do you think stoufers puts in their frozen stews? Where do you get carrot cubes in your soups? Where do you get bananas for your strawberry banana smoothies? Where does tomato paste come from?

The nicest looking stuff is put on the shelf and the ugly stuff is just ground up into your everyday food items.

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I'm holding a dataset (not from the US), let's go over it. Numbers are in %weight from initial produce. Loss is an actual final loss - products left in fields.

Cucumber: 30%

tomato, strawberry, peppers: 10%

Eggplant: 20%

Kolorabbi: 25%

Gleaning needs to make a comeback, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning

Edit: Not trying to be flippant, I really think people should promote this. If some produce gets regularly left behind, let people come in to pick it up and either use or distribute it.

Gleaning was great when we had villages with small fields interleaved. It's impractical and irrelevant the way modern industrial agriculture is structured.

Gleaning is still a thing.

http://endhunger.org/gleaning-network/

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/usda_glea...

Out of curiosity, got a source for that? I know my family uses brown bananas for banana bread but I haven't heard of cases like that for other food and I've heard grocery stores have to throw out a lot of food.

Bananas are sort of a special case because by the time they hit peak sugar content they’re heavily mottled. So, especially for baking, they’re often best to use right before they go bad.

This goes against the reports I have seen with photos of farmers dumping mountains of bananas that didn't fit supermarket guidelines.

That amount of wasted produce is probably very dependent on what kind it is. A mountain of wasted bananas might be a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things.

Bananas are some of the most fickle to deal with in the supply chain, because the sweet spot where they are usable is only a few days. Meanwhile, the oranges from our neighbors tree can last for weeks when stored in our pantry.

The farmers reported throwing out almost 40% of their produce because it was too long, too short, too curvy, not curvy enough. As well as rediculous rules about which veriaty of bananas should be curved or not even though they all grow curved and not curved.

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