Over one billion tonnes of food wasted a year - UN

[Penguin]

For anyone interested in this topic, here is an interesting documentation about the food madness: We feed the World (including english subtitles)

@Tribesman: The supermarkets are only at the end of the chain. It are the wholesalers that buy the stuff in bulk. They indeed have the demand for food in certain shapes.

@Tribesman: The supermarkets are only at the end of the chain. It are the wholesalers that buy the stuff in bulk.

"some bulk buying supermarkets" .
Some of the larger supermarket chains act as their own wholesalers and even get in on the agricultural production level.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Penguin

@Tribesman: The supermarkets are only at the end of the chain. It are the wholesalers that buy the stuff in bulk. They indeed have the demand for food in certain shapes.

Lots of vegetables that go on export from here are genetically engineered to have nice shape.

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

"some bulk buying supermarkets" .
Some of the larger supermarket chains act as their own wholesalers and even get in on the agricultural production level.

Yep, true - I wanted to point out that the entities that buy those large quantities are interested only in standartized sizes, for a number of reasons, like storage, transportation container standards, etc - and also because the customer has an image how a fruit should look like.
So it's also the fault of the consumer, but the question is how much of this image is made by those retailers.

Originally Posted by MH

Lots of vegetables that go on export from here are genetically engineered to have nice shape.

We don't buy them here - you can ship them to the US Genetically manipulated foods are not very popular in Europe - we can buy your avocados in all shapes and sizes.

[Aramike]

And the food prices has seen prices growing in the third world becasue agricultural farm land is used to produce plants that are to be turned into gas to feed our thirsty cars. That is not queer anymore, that is straightout perverse.

Perverse doesn't begin to describe this ineffective practice.

If you want to know about special interests in the US run amok, look no further than the racket brought on by corn-growers.