What a waste

So many of our human weaknesses crystalise around food — what we imagine it to be and how much of it we imagine we need to eat.

Food shortages, food waste, food production, obesity and all of the health and economic issues that flow from it, and almost worst of all, food fads and marketing, play hugely significant roles in our lives, and not always positive ones.

One of the most bizarre supermarket-imposed disciplines faced by food producers is the need to conform to certain shape and colour ideals. Knobbly, splotchy spuds just don’t sell, even if they are every bit as wholesome as their supermodel cousins. Corkscrew carrots can break a producer as no supermarket will stock them because, they assure us, we won’t buy them. If you combine that reluctance with the almost immoral amount of food we waste, it seems that we need to adopt a new set of values around the food we buy, eat and produce.

This afternoon the Cork Food Policy Council will be launched. The group will feed 5,000 people in Cork City centre with vegetables that were rejected by the shape-and-colour police. This not only shows how very daft some of our expectations around food are, but that by indulging them we are part of a wasteful, unsustainable and immoral process.