This Maryland Guy is Making Money on Food Waste, While Also Feeding the Hungry
By Brian Barth, from Modern Farmer
An absurd quantity of food goes to waste in the United States every year, resulting in frittered resources used to produce the food and lost profits for farmers. About six billion pounds goes into farmers' compost piles and local landfills each year, half of it in an edible state.
Some of the food is just “extra”—farmers don’t always have a buyer for every piece of produce they grow—and some of it’s just “ugly,” says Evan Lutz, 23, who has been cashing in on the deformed and rejected produce of his home state of Maryland since 2014.
“We sell ugly fruit,” says Lutz, beaming like a used car salesman, in the first five seconds of a promotional video for his company, Hungry Harvest. Lutz has a quirky sense of humor about his work, which lends a fun, wholesome, and adventurous vibe to the idea of paying him for food that would otherwise be thrown away. “I’ve always been ugly, and as a kid I faced a lot of discrimination even though I knew I was beautiful inside,” he continues, tongue-in-cheek, in the video. “That’s the same thing that’s happening to all the fruit out there. I want to make sure that people know that ugly fruit is also beautiful inside.”
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