After researching wasted food at grocery stores for some time, I felt I wasn’t getting the full picture. To move past food companies’ rhetoric and get a clear picture of the amount of food supermarkets throw away, I decided to get a first-hand look.

In September, 2006 I began working in the produce department at a large grocery chain. In addition to learning exactly what foods were tossed, I sought to understand why an industry with wafer-thin profit margins and advanced software systems still throws out tons of food each year. Follow the saga with these posts:

The Produce Project (intro) The Produce Project: Day 1–Packaged Waste

The Produce Project: Day 1–Training

The Produce Project: Day 2

The Produce Project: Day 3

The Produce Project: Day 4

The vegetables pictured here are the kind of produce the store “culls,” or throws away because of imperfections. As a culling guideline, I was told to toss a fruit or vegetable if I wouldn’t buy it as a shopper. Having one dark or soft spot meant it was trash. The same held if it was wrinkly or unusual looking. Uniformity and perfection were the ideals.