- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
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40% thrown away does not necessarily imply all others are better.
Normally imperfect produce goes to processing plants (juice, cans, pies etc.) but I’m not sure if there’s any significant market for banana chunks/puree.
There are some frozen fruit mixes that use banana chunks. Also some that use frozen puree in pre-measured shapes.
Banana juice is a thing, and banana chips and such. Probably too small of a market to repurpose all the uncool bananas :/
Banana chips are usually made with cooking bananas, also known as plátano in south America. It’s a different fruit, much less sweet, usually eaten after cooking and before the ripening is complete (plátano verde).
It’s quite uncommon in Europe and NA, but it’s a staple of the central and south American cuisine
They figured out ways to cram all the subsidized surplus soy and almonds nobody wants into every conceivable product, they could certainly manage to do so with ugly bananas.
Our local popular brand of fish sticks has banana puree as an ingredient. It’s not noticeable at all, at most it changes the texture of the batter a little.
There’s a difference between a market and a significant market.
baby food maybe?
It’s really crazy how cheap bananas are. They’re flown in from tropical countries and are at least half the cost of local in season produce. And they’re throwing away so many at every stage of production.
Imagine if they actually sold the whole crop to stores. Bananas would be $0.10 a pound. You would never be hungry.
It wouldn’t decrease prices quite as much as you’d think, since so much of the cost of a banana is transportation, which they don’t do with the ones they throw out. They should still do it, obviously, and then transport them on trains to reduce transportation cost as well.
iirc transport on ship is actually cheaper than trains i think due to not needing rails and also ships being fucking huge which means low surface area to volume ratio, so you need less steel to build them.
also how do you build a train line from south america to europe?
I was comparing to the shipping via trucks that’s done in the US. You do of course need some other method to get them across oceans.
Do you know where we can find data on this? The cost of each step that brings bananas to our homes.
Good old artificial scarcity
Bananas are already pretty cheap. I think they are the cheapest fruit in the grocery store.
id imagine there’s a demand for at minimum specialty stores that sell those 40% of bananas
The grapes of wrath was written 100.years ago. The fact that capitalism is still considered the only solution (other than the state sanctioned anarchists like Chomsky) is testament to the concept that the ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class.
Lenin wrote about old capitalism vs new capitalism.
Yet we have people today claiming the same thing with 1950s-80s vs now.
who has sanctioned chomsky
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all,” Steinbeck wrote. “Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground…a million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.”
What book is this? Sounds like something Steinbeck would write.
Grapes of Wrath. Good catch, as he wrote that book!
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Here lidl has boxes of random fruit and vegetables that don’t meet the pretty standard for like 25czk now probably more. But now I see them rarely. They were great when I wanted to make soup or something.
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That really sucks but “highly edible” is a very funny phrase.
My grocery store has a “imperfect produce” section, where they have funny shaped bananas, oranges that are not round, that sort of thing. Really cheap, and just as tasty.
oh banana, how i suffer with thee
This is bananas!
Them apples really get me sometimes frfr
I watched the documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy last night. Wow, there’s so much more waste than that in our systems.
I wonder if i can buy cheaper fruit by asking them if i can buy the things that super markets don’t want;
I should try a day
There are shops that sell this stuff.
Green grocers et cetera are usually focused more on local produce than conforming produce.
Woolies doesn’t have a secret stash of straight bananas you can buy for cheap.
I never seen a shop like that tbh, i don’t think they even exist here.
Woolies doesn’t have a secret stash of straight bananas you can buy for cheap
Well, not if you don’t ask them to keep some, just ask them or if you know a farmer/a friend of yours know one it’s even better then
These bananas aren’t discarded from your local woolies.
That was the original gimmick behind the subscription service “imperfect produce”. I gave it a try for a while (back before they pivoted to being a normal grocery subscription) and found out that a lot of this “perfectly good” produce is also completely devoid of flavor. Another problem is that “minor cosmetic defects” often means the skin of fruits is splitting so they mold within 48 hours of arriving.
Devoid of flavor is just a huge problem with our modern farming practices.
But agreed that instead of getting perfectly good produce that looks funny it felt like I was getting stuff that had been crushed under the pallets and or had mold or splitting issues.
We just don’t have an actual infrastructure for getting actual bulk waste produce to people who could use it. We really need food halls.
I do not believe there is no other way to make use of those bananas.
Last time, I was in the store, the last non-Chiquita bananas were two bunches with basically half-sized bananas.
And well, it did cross my mind that I’m basically paying extra for the “packaging” that way, as they have almost more peel than pulp. (The bigger the banana[1] the less surface area it has, relative to the volume.)
But on the other hand, I can portion those small bananas better, so there’s ups and downs, for sure. Which means, it’s actually quite fair that they have some smaller bananas in the store, too.
Or any other object. ↩︎
