not far from the tree

The Daily Mail recently reported about an oddly-shaped peck of pears coming soon to British markets – pears that are perfectly moulded to resemble the image of Buddha!

Unfortunately, they’re not growing in Toronto – at least not yet.

By far the most striking part of this story is that the pears are in the shape of Buddha. That’s for certain. But the second most striking part of this story is that earlier this year these pears wouldn’t have been allowed into British markets because they would have been classified as misshapen or “wonky.”

In July, wonky shaped fruit and vegetables such as curvy cucumbers and knobbly carrots returned to supermarket shelves after EU rules restricting the size and shape of 36 types of fruit and vegetables

For the last 20 years, EU-wide marketing standards have encouraged the sale of finest-looking produce for sale in shops.

To help put this into context, I go to Wayne Roberts in his book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food:

When I and my family do a stint of volunteering on organic farms each summer, we usually spend the hottest hour of the day culling the items that can’t be sold. Nothing is wrong with these items from the standpoint of safety, nutrition or taste. They just don’t look the way they do in the food fashion magazines… They are all cosmetically challenged. About a third of the fruits and vegetables grown in North America don’t get to the store because of this. If the farm has staff and volunteers who know better, they can enjoy a feast of ‘farmie food,’ as we called it. If a farm is diverse, the scrapped foods can be fed to chickens and pegs, who don’t discriminate on the basis of superficial appearances.

“For the most part, however, a third of many farm foods are lucky to be used for compost.”