The return of the “curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot” to EU supermarkets.

Consumers in Europe are likely to increasingly see fruit and vegetables with less than perfect appearance (the so called “wonky” produce) on their supermarket shelves from July 2009 as the EU tries to reduce its bureaucracy

Attractive and wholesome fruit and vegetables like these feed the world but have, over the last few decades, lost their place in the “First World’s“ supermarkets to perfectly shaped and coloured specimens. Through the supermarket pushing “quality” and bureaucrats busying themselves, visual standards gained a status that has had negative impacts for the consumer, the farmer and the environment.

The European Union is well known for the banana standard which, after a year of study, stated that a banana should be “5.5 inches long and 1.1 inches wide, and could not be abnormally bent”. This allowed the EU to advantage bananas from the Caribbean (mainly its former colonies) that met the standard to the disadvantage of Latin American producers who were backed by USA based multinationals. Rulings by the World Trade Organisation and the threats of the US lead to a truce with the tariffs being removed progressively.

But now regulations on 26 fruits and vegetables have been repealed while member states can allow the sale of 10 other products which do not meet the standards, so long as appropriate labeling is used.

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“This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development. The Commission will now formally adopt the changes which, for practical reasons, will be implemented from 1 July 2009.

The move was originally a response to member’s complaints about the burgeoning bureaucracy in the EU. However, the current difficult economic and food supply situations are given as further justifications for the change.

There are also other less obvious, but possibly more significant, justifications related to the elimination of loss. In a world where water and land for agriculture are becoming scarce and increased food consumption is contributing increasingly to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (CHGs), eliminating losses reduces the need for production. A reduction in production preserves land, reduces water use and limits GHG emissions. It is also likely that resource poor farmers will be able to benefit from less stringent constraints on the produce they grow to export.

In evaluating such changes, it is necessary to realise that all food products move through a “food supply chain” that includes agriculture, manufacturing, packaging, wholesaling, retailing and consumption with transport between all the steps. Whatever is lost or not used between agriculture and the consumer has to be made up by moving more through the upstream part of the chain.

from data in: Cooking up a storm, Food, greenhouse gas emissions and our changing climate.

The figure shows that the majority of the GHG emissions associated with the food supply chain are in agriculture (50 % of total), with household emissions being less than one third of those in agriculture.

If some fruit or vegetable is discarded at the supermarket because it doesn’t meet a standard, more has to be grown, transported and passed through the value chain with the associated land usage, carbon emissions and water usage that constrain how well the world is able to care for itself.

On the other hand if, for example, substandard strawberries can be used to make jam, the land, carbon and water impact is small because strawberries would anyway have been grown. The downside is that the farmer will receive less for their produce and might then become non viable. This situation is exaggerated if the waste is used for animal feed as the income to the farmer is even lower.

The possibility of finding uses for waste and avoiding dumping which must be paid for, is more difficult further down the value chain and with very delicate products.

footnote: a recent study in the UK has found that one third of all food bought by households is discarded and that almost two thirds of that waste could have been avoided if purchases, cooking and eating were better managed - this food, some 4.1 million tons was therefore unnecessarily grown and processed.

photo credit: jackol at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Cooking up a storm, Food, greenhouse gas emissions and our changing climate; Tara Garnett; Centre for Environmental Strategy; September 2008.

http://www.fcrn.org.uk/frcnResearch/publications/PDFs/CuaS_web.pdf

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