"produce" news and stories

Until today, I was completely unaware that there were rules governing how produce had to look at the supermarket. I just thought that it was the retailers who were only accepting the "pretty" stuff.

However, in Europe there are all kinds of rules that dictate what produce has to look like. It covers the diameter of bananas all the way to what percentage of asparagus has to be green. The produce that doesn't fit those regulations gets tossed out. Recently, the European Commission decided that throwing away perfectly good produce just because it doesn't look perfect is just plain wasteful. Additionally the practice may also be contributing to the global food crisis.

As a result, the old rules are being abandoned on about 26 fruits and vegetables. Due to some opposition, though, not every variety of produce is having the rules changed. The compromise is that strawberries, pears, tomatoes, apples, kiwi, and lettuce must still meet the old guidelines.

What do you think about rules regarding produce appearance?

[via TreeHugger]

About a year ago, I went shopping at a new grocery store. To my surprise, this store expected you to take your bagged produce over to a scale, select the variety of fruit or veg and print out a label to apply to the bag. This was done in the name of saving the check-out person the work of having to determine what type of apple or lettuce you'd just heaped into your grocery cart and speed things along. I was a little irritated when I first had to do it, and although I've come to enjoy playing with the machine, I still shudder over the process, as it creates more waste and renders the bag difficult to reuse due to the sticker.

However, engineers have created a new check-out scanner/scale and this one is all set to put these produce-section scales with label printers out of business. This new scanner contains a camera that snaps an image of the non-barcoded produce. It compares the picture to its database of images in order to determine whether it is a bunch of bananas, an orange or a bag of brussels sprouts. This way the produce is identified, weighed and price is determined, simply by placing the item or bag on the scanner.

As the Appliances & Kitchen Gadgets blog points out, there are still elements that would require human input. How could the scanner tell whether the produce was organic or conventional? Additionally, some stores price their produce by unit instead of by the pound (four ears of corn for a $1). Would it also be able count quantities? Despite the limitations, it's still an interesting innovation.

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We all know that we're supposed to wear sun screen to protect us from harmful radiation from the sun, right? Well did you know that fruit or vegetables grown in the sun need it too?

I know that thought has never occurred to me before, but I can see the reasoning. If human skin can get sunburned, why not apple skin? Apparently about 20 to 40 percent of some crops are destroyed every year from solar radiation, according to an article in the Mercury News. That's bad for farmers, who can only use the damaged fruit for juice, as well as the environment, as crops that are more susceptible to sun damage need more water.

The article features a company that makes sunscreen for produce, Purfresh which makes the veggie sunscreen Purshade among other things. I just thought that this perspective on sunburn was very interesting and worth sharing. How do you feel about sun screen for produce?

By now, you've probably stopped reading articles about the food crisis by now. You probably read a few at first, and a few turned to two a week, at best. Now your eyes skim by as journalists continue to cover this problem that's plaguing people around the world. But as long as it doesn't directly affect you (except where prices are concerned), who cares, right?

For a pared-down, concise, but still informative look at what you do (but mostly what you don't) know about the food crisis, check out National Geographic's quiz, What's up with the food crisis?

The quiz discloses the answers to such questions as "does buying U.S.-grown rice deprive struggling economies of income?" and "which two countries are having the greatest effect on the global grain market?"

And if you're not completely depressed by the results to the food crisis quiz, see how much you know about the safety of your produce.

We get our daily dose of food porn with Marisa's Food Porn Daily, but still I have to point out the photography of Rick Lee, a photographer out of Charleston, West Virginia. Rick has a blog where he showcases his photography, and because every Thursday is grocery night, there's an entire section dedicated to produce. When Rick goes, he takes incredible photos around the produce section, making basic things like corn and cabbage look positively sex-ay.

Who knew a picture of an onion could make you almost cry?

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