Camera Cuisine
Wasted food, ugly food: repairing and rethinking our culinary culture
By David Grabowski
Stroll into any eatery and you’ll see two things: people eating, and people taking pictures of their food. Smartphones are raised for the traditional overhead angle, a filter is applied, and the picture joins the ranks of #foodporn on Instagram. Restaurateurs are aware of the unofficial sub-Yelp that this creates; a snapshot of lattes and gourmet toast is as likely to persuade scrollers as a written review. Camera cuisine is the national cuisine.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with presenting food nicely. It’s part of the experience of dining, and even denotes a level of respect for eating. The problem is the overemphasis on visual appeal, an issue with implications far beyond the bistro. Eye appeal is an expectation for supermarkets, for example, and as a result, produce is modified to extend shelf life and guarantee cosmetic perfection. Produce that doesn’t meet visual criteria is dead on arrival. Growers don’t bother making the trip if their crop isn’t manicured; it’s thrown away on site or plowed back into the field.
These aren’t isolated acts of wastefulness; they’re the norm in America, a fact that’s not shocking for the country that leads the world in food waste. Fifty percent of consumable food is squandered in the US each year — 60 million tons equating $160 billion annually — a sizable step higher than the global average of one third. The average American family of four wastes $1,600 worth of food yearly. The flip side of these statistics is unacceptable: one in six Americans go hungry each year.
There’s an App for That
The outlook for the future of food may appear dim, but the charge to solve food waste also presents a pool of opportunity. An upswell of digital technology is rising to the occasion: an array of applications and products to help us recalibrate food waste.
For example, the Zero Percent app encourages real-time communication between restaurants and nonprofits. The app alerts a nonprofit when a donation is available, opening a line of transit for food that would otherwise be dumped. There are new products like BluApple, a small plastic apple that consumers place near fruits and vegetables to absorb ethylene gas, a signaling mechanism used by produce to coordinate uniform ripening. BluApple ($9.99 for a two-pack) can significantly lengthen the storage time of produce. For the restaurant industry, apps like Winnow have emerged, which attaches to a kitchen waste bin and scale to record and track kitchen waste. The app boasts $20,000–$50,000 in annual savings per kitchen.
These technologies can help consumers and food professionals reevaluate the supply chain, but other instances of food-waste still prove tricky, as in the case of airline food. Airlines have red tape policies that prevent unused food from being donated — it’s often incinerated near the airport. Airlines produce over 5.2 million tons of waste per year and these policies keep that number at a toxic level. It’s a startling reminder: The wasted food crisis is tied with our daily existence, often unaddressed, and often evading our notice.
Examining Our Expectations
Technologies to combat wasted food should be encouraged and lauded, but it’s important to understand which aspects of the crisis they address, and which they don’t. For one, they don’t tackle the problem of ugly food: food that is automatically thrown away due to appearance. It’s crucial that we examine our notion of what food should look like, and how much that even matters. There was a time when visual conditions like blemishes or odd shapes didn’t dissuade us from edible produce; a carrot was just a carrot. But now we have conditioned harmful expectations for our produce sections. The primary functions of food — sensory enjoyment and bodily nourishment — are at a complete disconnect with the way we evaluate food. Why are we so visually sensitive to products that are purposed for our mouths and stomachs?
From a psychological perspective, aversion to food based on appearance is mainly cultural. A 2011 study of 274 children found that visual preferences for food varied between segments of those children, suggesting that sociological factors were the root cause. Developmentally, food preference is most often linked to flavor, not appearance. We develop dietary preferences in infanthood, becoming accustomed to flavors that are passed on to us through breastmilk. Visual preference is most often a learned, cultural behavior, which helps explains the breadth of culinary diversity between cultures. It’s not unusual to see whole animals in foreign food markets, for example, but US consumers often recoil at the sight.
New businesses are capitalizing on the disconnect between misshapen food and consumers, such as Imperfect Produce, a San Francisco company that purchases cosmetically challenged produce and delivers it to consumers’ doors. Ugly food companies worldwide are jumping into the arena, using blemished produce to make powders, soups, relishes, sauces, and more, often at a discounted price. Their main marketing point is inherent, because saving wonky food is in vogue, at least overseas.
Denmark reduced food wastage by 25 percent from 2012–2017 by selling ugly food and offering discounts on close-to-expiration foods. In France, the supermarket chain Intermarché launched a campaign called Inglorious, featuring feisty ad copy like “The Ugly Carrot: In a soup who cares?” The campaign boosted store traffic by 24 percent. If these campaigns persevere, an ugly food section could be the new norm for American grocery stores too. The ugly carrot: a win–win for sustainability and thriftiness.
Diversifying Our Portfolios
The ugly food movement is honorable, but it still isn’t hammering the heart of the matter according to Richard Horsey, one of the authors of Ugly Food: Overlooked and Undercooked. “If the supermarkets agree to sell bags of cheaper apples, ugly but still tasty, they’re still perpetuating the myth that the more desirable fruit and vegetable should be more attractive,” argues Horsey. Whether a carrot is misshapen or cosmetically perfect doesn’t matter Horsey says, because “it’s still the wrong cultivar. We shouldn’t waste it, but what we really should be doing is producing tasty food, not beautiful food.”
Ugly Food kicks the Ugly Food Movement up a notch. It features recipes for unusual, often discarded ingredients like beef cheeks, pig feet and head, octopus, rabbits, squirrels, overlooked vegetables, and more. “It’s a little bit provocative,” says Horsey. “We’re doing it for a very serious reason, and we’re trying to stimulate what we think is an important debate.” Ugly Food challenges what we eat and why, pitting appearance against flavor. “This is not just a social, ethical, environmental point,” says Horsey. “If we can just tilt . . . a little bit away from only chops and tenderloins and chicken breast, we can change some of the economies of food production, we can reduce waste, we can eat better, and we can produce more food with the same resources.”
Reactions to Ugly Food vary from raised eyebrows to hate mail from militant vegans. “The greater irony are the people who say it’s disgusting to eat a rabbit . . . compared to a mass-produced chicken that’s been minced up and shoved into a nugget,” says Richard. But the key ingredients in Ugly Food aren’t featured just because they get reactions; they’re sustainable, they’re delicious, and there’s no good reason to not eat them. The octopus, for example, is far more sustainable than poultry and livestock. They live fast and die around one year of age. Eating them won’t damage the ecosystem, and an octopus is virtually all meat. “Pound for pound, it’s much more sustainable,” says Horsey.
According to Ugly Food, the tendency to wrinkle our noses at certain ingredients is nothing more than learned social behavior. “We’re not talking some sinister social engineering thing here,” says Horsey. “If you’re exposed to certain foods as an adult in your environment, if you taste these things, you don’t have the same aversions to it.” Any meat-eating American is used to salami or bologna — products which contain ground pig head — yet many of us would recoil at the sight of a whole pig head. “The more urbanization has cut us off from the realities of food production, the more we have been conditioned to think about meat as a slab of bright pink stuff shrink wrapped in Glad wrap,” says Horsey. “As soon as you stop thinking about that piece of meat as part of a living, breathing animal, the less respect you have for it. It just becomes a slice of bread, a tomato.”
Along with that respect comes a desire to not waste any part of an animal; sustainability is an automatic byproduct. To eat ugly is to eat respectfully. The point isn’t to eat more of a species simply because it’s plentiful, or to swap factory-farmed chicken with factory-farmed rabbit. The new goal is to diversify, to be open to eating more ingredients, and more components of those ingredients too.
Ugly Food also promotes eating what is sustainable, humanely raised, local, and in season, “. . . rather than the things that have been produced out of season halfway around the world and flown over to us,” says Horsey. “There’s a mismatch between what the land produces and what the local people like to eat.” The mismatch often materializes in the kitchen. Cooking from a recipe first, rather than by available ingredients, encourages the notion that foods should be available year-round, which leads to wasted energy and wasted ingredients. But thanks to recipe apps like SuperCook.com and AllRecipes, it’s easier than ever before to search for a recipe based on ingredient instead. Farmer’s markets are growing in popularity, encouraging local, seasonal shopping.
The Future Is in Our Kitchens
Let’s look at when America’s issue with wasted food mushroomed: the twenty-nine-year stretch between 1974 and 2003 when wasted food in America increased by 50 percent. This corresponded with a hike in food production, especially meat production, and a jump in obesity rates. The takeaway? We’re producing too much food, we’re producing low-quality food, and we’re significantly overvaluing cheap food.
Americans spend the least on food out of any country in the world — just 6.4 percent of their household income, compared with Algeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, where the percentage increases to 40 or more. “The cost of an ingredient is an economic signal of the cost of production,” explains Horsey. “Those signals have been obscured by supermarkets forcing farmers to push down the price of production . . . to fulfill this myth that food can be cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.” Cheaper isn’t better. In America’s case, cheaper equals a health disaster.
Obesity runs rampant, even among children, to the point that legislature is proposed against Big Gulps. The factory-farmed meat industry strains natural resources, accounting for 37 percent of methane emissions (twenty times as damaging as CO2 to our ecosystem). Pesticides used in agriculture are linked to higher cancer rates, even lower IQs in children. Flour-bleaching has been connected with diabetes.
Our charge now is to scrutinize every aspect of our relationship with food. It’s no longer a matter of picking items from a shelf; research is a prerequisite to eating. It’s difficult to separate truth from marketing, and labels — “organic,” “free-range,” “all-natural” — can’t be trusted at face value. Food education is paramount, especially among children. A recent survey of UK children found that one in five thought fish fingers were chicken; 29 percent thought cheese was a plant.
We’re missing out on one of the most essential, holistic relationships we can have. So what do we do? “It starts in the home,” according to Horsey. “At what point as a society did we stop eating home-cooked meals and start eating TV dinners, right? Is it really better to sit around at home eating food and watching television as a family, compared to sitting around a table and eating, getting sucked into fantastic food and sharing the joy of that?”
It’s time to cultivate a closer, more respectful relationship with our meals. Taking the time to seek out delicious ingredients, challenging our notions of how food should appear, and trying new ingredients can open up avenues of discovery and culinary enjoyment. If quality and sustainability become our goals, the effects will reverberate. We get a say about what should be in our grocery aisle; we vote with our stomachs.
The years ahead will test our relationship with food and our commitment to nutrition. Fast food — the antithesis of sustainable, wholesome food — is spreading globally. At the time of our interview, Richard Horsey was in Burma, which had just seen the arrival of its first KFC; 250 more were planned in the next six months. On a more positive note, a recent study showed that millennials are twice as likely as baby boomers to cook at home. There’s a renewed interest in quality food, and that spirit has the potential to change everything for the better.
The future of food is in our kitchens. It’s in our reusable shopping bags. It’s in our choices. It’s in our garbage cans. We choose our future by what we cook today, how we innovate, and how we evaluate our choices. If we stay open-minded, if we prioritize taste and quality over appearance, we can restore our relationship with food, with our environment, and with our health.
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