Nearly 40% of all food in this country is wasted, and there are over 49 million food-insecure people in the United States. Clearly we have an enormous opportunity if we can find a way to retrieve the imperfect food and to feed the hungry.
If we could stop wasting food, imagine how many more people we could feed!
People should go to their local grocery store or farmers' market and buy ugly, misshapen foods, then cook with them and document their dishes. And share not only the funny-looking foods, but the fantastic results.
Check out the produce bin in your fridge or your cabinet before you buy more. When you see something on the verge of going bad, freeze it, turn it into a sauce, make jam.
If we accept imperfect food, we can indeed change the world for the better.
If home cooks shopped in their own vegetable bin before going to the market, they would save money and help the environment, too, and all because they decided to rescue a vegetable before it turned bad.
If, as consumers, we can change our mindset so that we see gnarled, twisted, lumpy or otherwise imperfect produce as beautiful, we can create demand, change the system and ultimately help feed the world.
There's imperfect food out there that just needs a mouth to bite into it.
If shoppers looked at crooked carrots, misshapen potatoes, slightly dinged apples or too-small peaches and thought, wow, that looks delicious, imagine the benefits for struggling farmers.
If more people start selling ugly produce we have a chance to crack the hunger and malnutrition problems in the U.S. (Almost 90% of us do not get enough fruits and veggies).
