In the past, we have seen in the news that when there is little demand for a vegetable/fruit in the market or it is produced in excess, it goes to the garbage.
But would you throw away an apple because it is not the shape you wanted it to be? or trash a tomato due to its lesser color? In Europe, the preference to the vegetables shape, size and color matters more.
A massive portion of products produced fresh from the farms don’t make it to the shelf because of their visually less appealing nature but has nutrition which the supermarkets and the buyers don’t care.
But Jenny Dawson Costa is a different woman who doesn’t care of the shape, size or color of veggies and fruits. She is a talented woman from UK quit her job as an hedge fund manager to start Rubies in the Rubble – a company that collects the excessively produced, rejected vegetable that are not of the aesthetic standards.
Jenny made sauces, chutneys and jam from such vegetables. Her products which were not sought by people first started receiving recognition for the value they pack in it.
Jenny has seen success in her initiative which was once just a stall but now has grown into a big company that has struck deals with even luxury hotels. She said, “We need to start valuing food again, treating it like treasure and seeing it as something precious rather than a cheap commodity. I hope that wasting food will become the next littering. It’s almost cool to be able to show you’re affluent enough to be able to waste. It’s about switching that mindset and seeing that it’s actually socially unacceptable to be wasting unnecessarily.