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.
