Meet the ugly carrot

In the US, 40% of food goes to waste. That is more than 240 pounds of food per person per year! To understand why this is problematic, let's follow the adventure of Ugly Carrot.

Meet ugly carrot.

Ugly Carrot is just as nutritious and delicious as all the other carrots, but is a slightly different shape. This means that the carrot farmer can't sell Ugly Carrot, and will have to throw him away. 

When Ugly Carrot was just a seedling, the carrot farmer had to work hard to grow him. He might have even paid other farmers to work with him!

In fact, US farmers spend $218 billion a year on food that is not eaten. 

When Ugly Carrot ends up in the trash, more than the vegetable is wasted. To grow and transport Ugly Carrot, a farmer has to use water, land, and even gasoline! By throwing Ugly Carrot away, these limited resources are wasted, too. Once Ugly Carrot gets to the landfill, he releases methane. While everybody might know about the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, methane is actually a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent! Yikes! 

At the same time as Ugly Carrot goes to waste, 1 in 6 people in the US go hungry! That includes 13 million children. Ugly Carrot could have become part of a meal for one of these children. Rescuing food from going to waste could help feed millions of Americans each year. 

That is what Hungry Harvest does. We buy fruits & vegetables that would otherwise go to waste and deliver it to subscribers every week at a discount.

This post was originally published on the Jewish Relief Agency blog. Hungry Harvest is now working with JRA fight hunger.