水果说：长得丑有罪嘛？！

20160720ou 一中两外锵锵三人行 今日话题：水果说：长得丑有罪嘛？！ 报道称，美国每年都有近60亿磅果蔬产品被浪费只因不上镜... Lincoln: When you pick your fruits, you might want to be less picky next time. Yoyo, take it away. Yoyo: A recent report says that an estimated six billion pounds of fruits and vegetables are wasted every year in the United States because they are ugly. Six billion pounds equals to 20% of produce grown for human consumption. So, people are very picky when they are shopping. At the same time, supermarkets can be picky. Nick: Yes, I think that is the key distinguishing factor here. They have cosmetic defects, let us say; their appearance isn’t as polished or as perfect as you might imagine the standard fruit or vegetable to be. So, the supermarkets will reject fruits and vegetables that don’t meet these certain standards. They won’t even put them on the shelves to see whether people will buy them or not. They assume that people won’t buy these, and therefore it all just gets thrown away before it even makes it to the shelf, even though a lot of this fruit and veg is perfectly good, perfectly edible. They just don’t look the way a child’s drawing of that fruit or vegetable would look. In fact, I think people would be willing to buy these kinds of fruits and veg. Different experiments around the world have shown that people are quite willing to buy fruits that don’t meet these standards; it’s the stores, more often, that are blocking the way here. Yoyo: The fruits or vegetables like these, they have a different look than all the other ordinary vegetables, and people are always saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”, now they are judging a vegetable by its cover! Lincoln: Yeah, but I mean, at the same time, you kind of have to understand where the shops are coming from, where the stores are coming from. If people aren’t buying these fruits because they go off, or because they aren’t aesthetically pleasing, do they have a responsibility to still stock them? They’re businesses. Nick: Well it’s not that people aren’t buying them; it’s that they’re not stocking them, so you don’t know whether people would have bought them, because they weren’t on the shelf. Lincoln: No, but I feel like, no, what has led to the one thing, do people, do they not stock them because people don’t buy them, or people don’t buy them because they don’t stock them? Nick: No, they don’t stock them because they think that people won’t buy them. But when people have led campaigns to try to reduce waste, and they have introduced a separate shelf in the store with “ugly fruit”, they call it, or “ugly vegetables”, and especially when you put a slight discount on it, because it hasn’t had to go through all of this kind of appearance testing, you can then sell it to the consumer for a slightly lower price, so people are actually very willing to buy it. It tastes the same. Yoyo: I think the only thing that matters is whether vegetables and fruits are fresh enough or not. They taste the same. And also, they are not rotten. So they are all good vegetables and fruits. Still, they can sell it instead of simply wasting it. Because you can see that a latest report shows that there might be some 795 million people in the world who do not have enough food to lead a healthy, active life. So why not collect fruits that you cannot sell, instead of simply throwing it away, just give it to the people who really need it.