Americans are throwing away tons of “ugly food” each year, causing widespread food insecurity
WRITTEN BY
Jilly Stephens
Executive Director, City Harvest
Growing up in the countryside, I ate my fair share of ugly carrots, and despite their appearance, they were delicious. However, the hundreds of ugly carrots I enjoyed would have never made it to supermarket shelves or through restaurant kitchen doors with today’s high cosmetic standards.
From measuring the millimeters of a cucumber’s curve to fearing a bird-like tomato, industry standards and consumer perceptions determine what produce is pretty enough to sell. This is a surface-level judgment that fails to consider the item’s nutritional value and the 48.1 million food-insecure people in the US who would benefit from the energy, vitamins and minerals on the inside.
In a country where nearly 40% of the food supply is never eaten and 20% never even ends up in grocery stores (primarily because it looks bad), the number of food-insecure people is unacceptable. Our hunger issue is partially an image problem. The millions of Americans who support anti-hunger initiatives believe this, too. Yet our collective efforts to end hunger are often undermined by the inefficiencies before food even reaches the consumer.
The “ugly food movement” is one way to address food waste. It’s spreading globally with initiatives from UK supermarket chain Tesco and is gaining momentum in the US with efforts from Food & Wine editor Dana Cowin’s #LoveUglyFood campaign and grocery chains like Raley’s in California. But more can be done.
By examining the losses that occur during harvest to the waste that occurs post-harvest, we gain insight not only into our inefficiencies but also into possibilities for improvement.
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http://qz.com/507414/americans-are-throwing-away-tons-of-ugly-food-each-year-causing-widespread-food-insecurity/
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... vegetables for 4 minutes in order to get 2 onions. I want to say: "Geez lady, do you want me to get an X-ray machine so you can make sure all the molecules are lined up correctly" 
and the suppliers get paid for all of it -- soups, sauces, pet food, hot dogs, V8 juice, etc, etc
They make their non-profit sound like a much needed and noble cause by making up numbers and denying the way that the agricultural and food supply system works.
For example, this seems to be fantasy:
Truth is the biggest chunk of calories consumed by humans in the US are coming from beverages. Beverages that are never get any uglier and have a shelf life up to years. So if you look at milk production in the US, most milk comes from the West coast mega farms. It is broken down into fat and non fat, shipped to packagers across the country who blend the fat and nonfat back into "2%" or "whole" milk. There was a big campaign to get people to buy skim and 1% milk and doing so helps the food processors because it creates excess fat/cream that they sell to you separately as butter, ice cream, cheese, etc. Any excess can be stored as powered milk and sold to you or the government later.
Another big chunk of calories comes from chicken. We kill 60 billion chickens per year and like the milk, they are broken down and every part is sold for as much as possible. Bones and gristle go to dog food, odd parts get made into "nuggets." Something as simple as chicken winds up so processed that we readily accept nonsense (and creepily cannabalistic) terms for chicken parts like "breasts" (they aren't mammals) and "fingers." Waste is almost zero.
So what they seem to be talking about with their hyperbolic "40% of the food supply" is tomatoes, greens and other veg sold raw. Even if we threw away every single fruit and vegetable, ugly or not, we get nowhere near 40% of the food supply:
205 out of a total of 2543 = 8% of total calories for fruit and vegetables
