The straightness of the bananas aren’t the issue, it’s the waste created by throwing out perfectly good bananas for not being purportedly aesthetically pleasing enough.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a straight banana, but you are being forced to have your only banana option be curved.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be every banana, I imagine some are irredeemably damaged at some point during production or are so outside of banana norms that they look as though they may be spoiled.
Allowing a higher percentage of abnormal bananas to go to market would give people the option to buy them, but it wouldn’t remove their ability to buy normal bananas.
Allowing a higher percentage of abnormal bananas to go to market would give people the option to buy them, but it wouldn’t remove their ability to buy normal bananas.
The core of it is this:
You have a crop. The “pretty” ones get sold to supermarkets at the highest price (who in turn only want to buy the “pretty” ones because they sell best). The less pretty ones get sold to manufactured food companies, where the processing hides that they weren’t “pretty” - diced veggies for canned vegetable soup, fruit purees, that kind of thing. There’s not enough demand here to sell all the “ugly” ones. There’s also online markets that sell “ugly” produce, like Misfits Market - they buy it cheaper than supermarkets and can resell cheaper than supermarkets as a result. Depending on the crop, some lower quality ones might get sold as animal feed. The rest is running out of people who want to buy it.
There’s not enough demand here to sell all the “ugly” ones.
I’m not sure that you (and the banana merchants) are correct about this assumption. In this thread, there are many people who want to buy ugly produce, and not all want it at a reduced price.
If there were, the markets that specialize in “ugly” produce would do much, much better, have higher demand and buy up more of the produce to fill it.
That 40% is what’s left after supermarkets buy all the “pretty” bananas they think they can sell, manufactured food companies buy up what they can use for stuff like purees, sliced banana going into various products, that sort of thing and “ugly” produce sellers (places like Misfits Market) buying up what they think they can sell. I don’t think bananas are used in animal feed but for crops where that’s a common use some of it gets sold for that. Broadly, each of these involves the farmer making less money per unit weight than the previous and selling less desirable product to each.
And yet people here are perfectly happy to eat ugly produce and expressing an unmet demand. The complaints about ugly produce markets here are all about spoiled or tasteless food, not appearance.
If banana farmers shipped 90% of the bananas they grew, they could reduce the share of their land dedicated to bananas and either broaden their repertoire of crops or allow the gained area to rewild.
Bananas are particularly sensitive to disease, so having borders of other crops would help prevent spread between banana plantations.
Is capitalism really the problem here?
Is there another system that would bend straight bananas?
Or do we just force people to eat approved food. That sounds a bit shit if im honest.
The straightness of the bananas aren’t the issue, it’s the waste created by throwing out perfectly good bananas for not being purportedly aesthetically pleasing enough.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a straight banana, but you are being forced to have your only banana option be curved.
You seem to have missed my point.
Any solution requires all bananas to be consumed, including the less desirable ones.
You could produce less, but all produced nanas desirable or not need to be consumed lest they be wasted.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be every banana, I imagine some are irredeemably damaged at some point during production or are so outside of banana norms that they look as though they may be spoiled.
Allowing a higher percentage of abnormal bananas to go to market would give people the option to buy them, but it wouldn’t remove their ability to buy normal bananas.
The core of it is this:
You have a crop. The “pretty” ones get sold to supermarkets at the highest price (who in turn only want to buy the “pretty” ones because they sell best). The less pretty ones get sold to manufactured food companies, where the processing hides that they weren’t “pretty” - diced veggies for canned vegetable soup, fruit purees, that kind of thing. There’s not enough demand here to sell all the “ugly” ones. There’s also online markets that sell “ugly” produce, like Misfits Market - they buy it cheaper than supermarkets and can resell cheaper than supermarkets as a result. Depending on the crop, some lower quality ones might get sold as animal feed. The rest is running out of people who want to buy it.
I’m not sure that you (and the banana merchants) are correct about this assumption. In this thread, there are many people who want to buy ugly produce, and not all want it at a reduced price.
If there were, the markets that specialize in “ugly” produce would do much, much better, have higher demand and buy up more of the produce to fill it.
That 40% is what’s left after supermarkets buy all the “pretty” bananas they think they can sell, manufactured food companies buy up what they can use for stuff like purees, sliced banana going into various products, that sort of thing and “ugly” produce sellers (places like Misfits Market) buying up what they think they can sell. I don’t think bananas are used in animal feed but for crops where that’s a common use some of it gets sold for that. Broadly, each of these involves the farmer making less money per unit weight than the previous and selling less desirable product to each.
And yet people here are perfectly happy to eat ugly produce and expressing an unmet demand. The complaints about ugly produce markets here are all about spoiled or tasteless food, not appearance.
If banana farmers shipped 90% of the bananas they grew, they could reduce the share of their land dedicated to bananas and either broaden their repertoire of crops or allow the gained area to rewild.
Bananas are particularly sensitive to disease, so having borders of other crops would help prevent spread between banana plantations.
Kind of like some sort of Food and Drug Administration?
And let’s be perfectly clear what you mean by “approved food” here. We’re talking about bananas that weren’t “bent enough”.