Fruta Feia
-
Tempting Europe With Ugly Fruit
LISBON — Isabel Soares went shopping for produce on a recent morning, carefully selecting her fruits and vegetables with a discriminating eye. She picked up some spinach whose leaves had turned an unappealing yellow. Then some tomatoes whose skin had been damaged by sunburn and insect bites. Finally, she set on some zucchini that had grown so large and deformed that they curved almost into a doughnut shape.
They were perfect for her.
At a time of lingering economic hardship for many in the European Union, whose penchant for regulation has extended even to the shape, size and color of the foods its citizens eat, Ms. Soares has bet that there is a market for fruits and vegetables deemed too ugly by government bureaucrats, supermarkets and other retailers to sell to their customers.
Six months ago, she and a handful of volunteers started a cooperative called Fruta Feia, or Ugly Fruit, which in its short life is already verging on a kind of countercultural movement. It has taken off with hard-pressed consumers, won applause from advocates outraged by Europe’s skyrocketing food waste, and provided a backhanded slap to overweening European Union rule makers. In its own way, it has even quietly subverted fixed notions of what is beautiful, or at least edible.
“The E.U. norms are based on the mistaken idea that quality is about appearance,” said Ms. Soares, 31, who formerly worked in Barcelona as a renewable energy consultant. “It’s of course easier to measure the exterior aspect rather than interior features like sugar levels, but that is the wrong way to determine quality.”
She said her goal was “to break the dictatorship of aesthetics, because it has really helped increase food wastage.”
Europe wastes 89 million tons of food a year, according to a study presented in May by the Dutch and Swedish governments, which called on the European Union “to reduce the amount of food waste caused by the labeling system.”
For her part, Ms. Soares estimates that a third of Portugal’s farming produce goes to waste because of the quality standards set by supermarkets and their consumers. She says the waste is also a striking example of misplaced regulatory intervention by the European Union, which has tried to unify food standards across the 28-nation bloc.
In fact, Europe’s food rules, adopted as part of the 1992 completion of the European Union’s single market, have long helped fuel anti-European sentiment, particularly in Britain, where tabloid newspapers ridiculed Brussels bureaucrats for supposedly trying to ban “bent bananas” or “curved cucumbers.”
Faced with such criticism, the European Commission cut back six years ago its list of marketing rules for fruits and vegetables to 10 from 36.
For products like tomatoes, which remain on the list, the European legislation sets minimum requirements, including that the tomatoes arrive “clean, practically free of any visible foreign matter” and “fresh in appearance.” The law then places them into three classes, including a lower one that allows for defects. Supermarkets, however, generally opt for a class that permits only “a slight defect in shape and development” of the tomatoes.
In addition, “many supermarkets set their own standards, whether or not there are E.U. standards,” said Roger Waite, an agricultural spokesman for the European Commission. Such “private standards,” he added, “are obviously controversial for the farmers.”
The commission is set to publish new recommendations in June to fight food waste. They will include proposals to improve sell-by date labeling, as well as to channel more unwanted produce to food banks or animal feed.
João Barroso, an environmental scientist, said he supported any initiative that reduced the control of large producers and retailers over European farming.
“The E.U. has set standards and follows an agricultural policy that is focused on what the big players in the food supply chain want, even if that means an incredible amount of waste,” Mr. Barroso said.
Ms. Soares said she could sell her food without contravening European Union legislation because Europe’s marketing rules apply only to food that is labeled or packaged, which is not the case with the produce that goes into her crates.
Even though Fruta Feia has been growing “exponentially,” she said she would maintain a scale that allowed her to visit her producers regularly. “We want to work with local farmers because we want to know who we help,” she said.
Ms. Soares started her venture in November after winning a $20,000 prize from the Gulbenkian Foundation, which held an entrepreneurship competition for Portuguese living overseas.
Since then, she said, Fruta Feia has built a waiting list of 1,000 customers. It has sold 21 tons of food at two distribution centers in Lisbon. The association has 420 registered customers, who pay a $6.81 membership fee on top of the cost of their weekly food crate, which is $4.77 for a crate containing about eight pounds of fruits and vegetables.
At first, Ms. Soares said, she struggled to persuade farmers to sell her their unwanted food. “I think some suspected that I was an undercover sanitary inspector,” she recalled.
Nowadays, however, she gets a warm embrace from Paulo Dias, who runs a family farm in Cambaia, about 45 miles from Lisbon, that supplies Sonae, one of Portugal’s largest supermarket companies. The farm covers 18.5 acres, of which 10 are greenhouses.
“In a greenhouse, it’s a lot easier to control a tomato than in the open air,” Mr. Dias said, “but that doesn’t mean the taste gets better.”
Of his annual production of about 2,000 pounds of tomatoes, Mr. Dias said a quarter do not meet Sonae’s quality standards — covering color, size and skin texture — and are therefore dumped.
Fruta Feia buys the unwanted food at about half the price at which producers sell it to supermarkets. Mr. Dias said that “any extra income of course helps.” But, he added, “It also makes me feel good to know my tomatoes aren’t wasted and that people who perhaps have little money get to eat something that is just as good as if they could afford the supermarket.”
José Manuel Santos, another farmer outside the town of Mafra, estimated that half of his spinach harvest would be thrown away this year because abrupt weather fluctuations had helped turn the leaves yellow.
“The market has decided that spinach absolutely needs to be green, so I’m having to throw out spinach that is of the same quality,” he said.
So far, Fruta Feia has a staff of only three people, including Ms. Soares, as well as a handful of volunteers, some of whom are foreigners living in Lisbon. Andrea Battocchi, a 30-year-old architect, said his plan was to present the Fruta Feia project at Expo 2015, an international exhibition that will be held in his native Milan and will have “feeding the planet” as its theme.
At a time of austerity and 15 percent unemployment in Portugal, Fruta Feia has attracted customers because of its low pricing, but most customers said they mainly wanted to support local agriculture while reducing waste.
“This food is of course cheap, but it’s also local, fresh and would otherwise go to waste, which really bothers me,” said Ana Neves, a call-center worker. “I’ve looked closely at some of this stuff and can’t see why it can’t make it to the supermarket.”
As her last customers were leaving, Ms. Soares checked to see whether any fruit remained in the crates in which volunteers put surplus food, which customers are encouraged to take home free. “Of course, nothing can go to waste here,” she said.
