That’s what we wanted to know about the picture below when a group of us from the Eastern Canada Farm Writers Association recently paid a visit to an onion farm in the Holland Marsh. To us, it seemed like a bin of perfectly good onions, just waiting for someone to bag, buy, cook and eat.
But that’s not so, according to Jamie Reaume, Executive Director of the Holland Marsh Growers Association. Judge for yourself:
“If it’s not perfect, it can’t go to retail even though the taste is the same,” he explained as he cut into one of the reject onions for us. “Any onion without skin or with marks on them won’t make the grade.”
Consumers, and in turn retailers, have become very demanding when it comes to what food should look like, he says, adding that this leads to tons of fine-tasting produce ending up being composted.
There’s a great story in the Toronto Star today by Jennifer Bain about Holland Marsh farmer Avia Eek, and they talk about this very issue, if you’re curious to know more.
Eek is a social media fan, using Twitter to spread the word about food and farming. Often she tweets about what she’s doing on the farm, including grading onions. This is what caught Bain’s attention and led to the profile in today’s paper.
I get that consumers have their demands, but such a waste! Does the article address other ways the food can be used besides composting? Not that composting is bad. But that’s a lot of onions. Going to read that article…
Hi Jackie – we asked that question too, during the tour, and heard the food banks don’t want them(many can’t handle food donations in this form and many people don’t know how to cook), and nobody else seems to either. You’re right, it is a real waste. Thanks for reading!
Such a shame — I’d think restaurants would want this. It can be served with the diner never knowing it had a mark or imperfect skin. School lunch programs could capitalize on this “rejected” produce by buying it at a lower cost.
I’ve noticed even at my local farmers market, marred produce is cheaper. There’s a basket of “loose asparagus” made up of ripe, delicious stalks that are only exiled because buyers prefer the identically shaped stalked, equal thicknesses and lengths. Apples with spots are in a bin, “ugly” tomatoes are cheaper.
I’m now on a mission to buy the ugliest produce I can find – I might do a post of photos of ugly produce.
[...] I learned about this first hand during a visit with a group of journalists this past spring to the Holland Marsh, a region of dark, fertile soil just north of Toronto where farmers grow great-tasting Ontario produce. Taste alone doesn’t matter, we heard that day. Fruits and vegetables with even minor imperfections – like onions with small marks or without skin, for example – are rejected by retailers and farmers end up being forced to compost them. [...]