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Farmer's Generosity Exposes Supermarket Switcheroo

Farmer's Generosity Exposes Supermarket Switcheroo

If you have children, you'll know all about 'Look over there'. It's what children do innocently enough to draw your attention from whatever mischief they might be up to. Bless.

Some people go on to make it a life time habit. Then it's more calculated subject changing or diversion in order to advance their own agenda at the expense of yours, while simultaneously managing your impression of them.

The heart warming pictures of ABC Wide Bay's facebook page this week of farmers Russell and Shana Mortimer delivering their supermarket rejected sweet potatoes had an unintended consequences of shining a light on supermarket 'look over there' practices. Before I get on with badgering the practices of supermarket chains and how it impacts on livelihoods, it's important to acknowledge the continuing generosity and community spirit among farmers that delivered this story and others like it.

The point of the ABC Wide Bay Facebook post was to share how one group of farmers were giving their unwanted produce to another. Sweet potatoes are after all, exceptionally nutritious food. As humans, we know that and like to buy sweet potatoes for that reason. The funny thing about sweet potatoes is that it really doesn't matter what they look like or what size they are, they are still nutritious and people will eat them. As long as they can buy them. In this case, they can't buy them because they are being fed to pigs. Because they were rejected by a supermarket for sizing, splits and look.



These are the actual sweet potatoes that were knocked back. I am sure there is something dreadfully wrong with them that isn't immediately apparent. Maybe could start a guessing game.

Somewhat bizarrely, one of the biggest hypocrisies of supermarket waste is the food they never receive in the first place. While we are all focused on supermarket landfill skips at the back door full of old food, we aren't looking at their front doors for the new food - or more specifically their logistics centres. What is not going on at the front door is even worse then what is going on at the back door. 

These sweet potatoes are just one example of wasted food. To quote the ABC Wide Bay post:

Sweet potato farmers Russell and Shana Mortimer are donating sweet potatoes by the truckload to graziers in drought.

This load - all 22 tonnes of it - will end up in Gunnedah, NSW with help from Aussie Helpers. Sweet potato makes great cattle fodder and these ones - which may have blemishes or splits that supermarkets won't accept - would otherwise be plowed into the ground.  They're hoping to make it a weekly donation for as long as the farmers need it - "or until we run out", Russell says - and other farms in the area are getting on board.

So, we've got at least 100 tonnes of sweet potatoes here that would have been ploughed back into the ground because a supermarket thought consumers wouldn't buy them. Well the good news is that more and more secondary stream businesses are emerging to support these situations.

Whether a producer gets knocked back for imperfection or is late for their delivery window to the logistics centre, documentaries like the ABC's War on Waste are shining a spotlight on both the issues and the emerging businesses who are moving in to take up the products that would otherwise have been wasted. We just need more of them, because so much perfectly fresh food is being wasted.

In defence of logistics centres, with the thousands of lines carried by supermarket chains, it's very easy to see how Farmer Joe slips from being a person with a livelihood to a number on a delivery docket. With a never ending stream of trucks dropping off, unloading, sorting, accounting, counting, storing, repacking, reloading, delivering - the logistics are mind boggling. At that is before you even begin to think through the logistics of fresh produce, freezer items, refrigerated items, chemical items etc.

But in the middle of it all, the manufacturers, producers, growers are still people - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends - often farmers, who would do better to sell a trailer load of sweet potatoes to someone who wants them instead of being sent home because they were 10 minutes late to a delivery window.  

It turns out that the biggest bully in the school yard is not even inside the school yard. He's outside the front gate.

(As I write this, I acknowledge that I could be perpetrating a conspiracy that doesn't exist, but whether by default of design, the outcome is the same. And at this point in time, with our escalating food production issues and increased focus on waste, there would not be an FMCG executive in the country who wouldn't be well across this emerging firestorm. And making decisions about whether to use a fire hose, blanket of start a fire from the opposite direction.)

This is good food and there are plenty of people who would eat it. And it all takes us another step closer to manufacturers and producers taking more control and going direct to consumers. Bring it on.

Images: ABC Wide Bay
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