You won’t typically find cracked tomatoes, curved cucumbers or two-legged carrots at the grocery store. Imperfect produce is a tough sell for consumers, so it’s often abandoned in farm fields.
To demonstrate how much food this wastes, an event in Portland Friday called Feeding the 5000 served up a free community meal made from these fresh but forgotten vegetables.
The ingredients of this meal have their beginnings in places such as Jordan’s Farm in Cape Elizabeth. One of the owners, Penny Jordan, snaps off a side leaf from a Brussels sprout plant, takes a bite and invites a group of visitors to do the same.
“I eat the stalk,” she says. “Aren’t they yummy?”
“Oh my God,” a visitor says. “They’re delicious.”
Standing in a field full of these leaves, Jordan laments that they’ll all go to waste because consumers will only purchase what they’re taught is edible, and will also only choose the most pristine produce for their shopping baskets.
“It just frustrates me that they want the perfect pepper. So if you have a pepper that looks like a scrunched up face, people won’t buy that, they want the perfect bell pepper, even though they aren’t stuffing the pepper, they’re just chopping it up,” she says.
Farmers can’t afford to spend precious time and resources harvesting produce that consumers won’t buy. But this week, a group of volunteers visited about a dozen farms across the state, including Jordan’s, to glean some of these produce seconds and use them.
Hannah Semler cuts off small broccoli florets sprouting off the side of the stalk that are too small to sell.
“That’s also the gleaning, is a little bit of a treasure hunt,” she says.
Semler is from Healthy Acadia, one of more than a dozen food, health and environmental nonprofits that’s organizing the Feeding the 5000 event in Portland.
“We have harvested to date close to 4,000 pounds of food in four days, and we’re going to be feeding 5,000 people from that,” she says.
But first, all those vegetables need to be chopped.
At a Disco Chop Party at Fork Food Lab in Portland, more than three dozen volunteers peel and slice slightly scabbed potatoes.
They’ll be thrown into a hearty vegetable stew, along with about a dozen other would-be vegetable castaways such as jumbo carrots and curly green garlic scapes.
“They’re dry on the end, but once those cut off, turn into beautiful garlic scapes,” Semler says.
By serving up these vegetables as part of a meal that can feed 5,000 people, organizers are trying to shine a spotlight on the sheer volume of local, fresh food that’s wasted.
“Changing public perception of what is considered ‘waste.’ And realizing that so much of this food is delicious, edible, fit for consumption, and it’s just a matter of shifting mindframes,” says Sarah Brown of the UK-based organization Feedback, which started these community meals back in 2009.
In Monument Square in Portland on Friday, Erica and Christian Klein stop by to try the free soup.
“It’s delicious,” Erica says.
“It tastes very good. You can’t tell that these vegetables weren’t going to make it to the supermarket, not at all,” Christian says.
In fact, knowing the back-story to this soup adds to the flavor, says Jan Nelson of Cape Elizabeth.
“So it tastes even better,” she says.
Nelson says she’d love to see stores offer blemished produce so it doesn’t go to waste.
By reaching consumer palates in this way, organizers hope that Feeding the 5000 will spur action. Jim Hanna of the Cumberland County Food Security Council says at the national level, he’d like to see support for farmers to sell produce seconds.
“There are a lot of subsidies for the unhealthy food that makes its way into our kitchens. Part of what we’re advocating is that we need to stop subsidizing unhealthy food, and support our local growers,” he says.
Some gleaned produce is donated to food pantries, but Semler says there’s plenty left that could allow schools and hospitals to offer more fresh, local produce.
“There’s a price point issue, and there’s some opportunity that I see in making a connection between surplus on farms that would otherwise not be finding a home, and institutions that are looking for a specific price point to gain access to that food,” she says.
And at the individual level, Feeding the 5000 organizers say small steps can make a difference in reducing food waste. Even just making a shopping list and sticking to it, or giving imperfect produce a chance.
