Woolworths boss Brad Banducci has defended the amount of food the supermarket giant rejects with a top executive saying no one wants a banana that is "too big", a South Australian parliamentary inquiry has heard.
A lot of this is on us (the consumers). If they put produce on the shelves that isn’t perfect, we don’t buy it.
To a certain extent, yes. But the sociological phenomenon it has morphed into is being reinforced significantly by supermarkets limiting the types of produce we see on shelves. Where do our ideas of what a banana should look like come from? Very few people live on farms or are buying from farmer’s markets, so their main exposure to produce throughout their life is through the supermarket shelf. You say “produce…that isn’t perfect” but who is determining what perfect looks like? I would argue it’s not the individual who is consciously making the determination that a large banana isn’t perfect. The expected norm is that a banana should be smaller and that heavily influences the individual’s resulting behaviour to the extent that they cannot be blamed in a way that would actually solve this problem. We need to change society’s values as a whole, and that requires large-scale change at the level of something like supermarket regulation.
To a certain extent, yes. But the sociological phenomenon it has morphed into is being reinforced significantly by supermarkets limiting the types of produce we see on shelves. Where do our ideas of what a banana should look like come from? Very few people live on farms or are buying from farmer’s markets, so their main exposure to produce throughout their life is through the supermarket shelf. You say “produce…that isn’t perfect” but who is determining what perfect looks like? I would argue it’s not the individual who is consciously making the determination that a large banana isn’t perfect. The expected norm is that a banana should be smaller and that heavily influences the individual’s resulting behaviour to the extent that they cannot be blamed in a way that would actually solve this problem. We need to change society’s values as a whole, and that requires large-scale change at the level of something like supermarket regulation.