The Era Of Supermarkets
Flawless food and fully stocked shelves at major grocery stores are grooming a generation of spoilt, picky shoppers
Press and pinch: Fresh produce are most susceptible to damage from shoppers’ handpicking.
A WELL-COIFED, savvy shopper with a mission, Sandy Teo picks up a roll of lettuce and turns it around to check for tints of yellow. Once she spots the slightest sign, it gets tossed back to the rack like a basketball.
The process continues until she finds her ideal lettuce – perfectly green, flawless, free of worm bites. Back home, the 35-year-old peels off the first two layers as they are deemed unclean to eat.
Unknown to her, the first two layers were once the fifth and sixth layers of the lettuce two days ago. From farm to fork, food goes through progressive rounds of cosmetic filtering, where it gets discarded for looking less than perfect according to market standards.
Before Madam Teo’s supreme roll of lettuce hit the rack, it went past the sharp eyes and skilful hands of vegetable sellers at Pasir Panjang wholesale market, where the first phase of cosmetic filtering takes place.
Every day, 250 vegetable sellers at the market spend dusk to dawn trimming, preening and discarding “ugly” vegetables to prepare them for sale to hawkers and wet market sellers.
The criteria: vegetables must be free of pest marks, be in the right shade of colour and not look too ripe.
“Of course I’ve to make my vegetables look nice. If not, who will buy them?” says stall owner Albert Li, 60.
He estimates about one-third of all vegetables at the wholesale market get thrown away for not meeting the mark.
Green galore: A Pasir Panjang wholesale seller filters out the perfect-looking vegetables to prepare them for sale.
Based on our observations at food waste recycling company IUT Global, the market discards up to 30,000 kilos of unwanted vegetable parts and blemished fruits every day.
American journalist Jonathan Bloom, 33, who chronicles food waste and efforts to salvage it, attributes this quest for cosmetic perfection to the increasing popularity of food culture.
“More people are watching cooking shows on television. The food magazines always have not just perfect but beautiful items. Now, stores make more effort to turn their displays into an exhibit,” he says in an email interview.
“A little bit of that trend is fine, but we’ve gone too far when we’re not harvesting pears that aren’t the right circumference.”
ARTICLE RESOURCES:
Do we really need perfectly shaped vegetables? Well, some people think so. A certain European country even has legislation against selling an out of shape or off-colour say carrot as a ‘carrot’.
I mean at the end of the day, food is also about taste and nutrients, no?
Wow, which European country doesn’t allow imperfect food?! That’s shocking!
Shows the benefits of being on the right side of the rich-poor country gap. This law would not be passed in say, Ethiopia for sure.
HI Rychel, it’s the whole EU actually. There’s a legislation (has been around for 20 years) which prohibits the sale of misshapen produce. The lifted the ban on some 26 types of fruits in 2009, but it remains on 10 types of fruits and vegetables: apples, citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes.
Imagine the amount that can’t make it to markets even though it’s just 10 types.
For more information: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7723808.stm