+
Sign up for
The Upworthiest
Our top stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox.
Most Shared

Guess how much produce is thrown out because it's not pretty enough for us as consumers? A lot.

Nobody's perfect. So why do we expect our fruit to be?

The old saying goes, "Don't judge a book by its cover." So why do we do it when it comes to food?

Have you ever noticed how nearly all the fruits and veggies you see in most grocery stores look kinda ... perfect? It turns out that not all produce grows into perfect, uniformly shaped foodstuffs. In fact, a good chunk of produce might be considered downright ugly.

But you know what's truly ugly? The huge amount of food that gets thrown out simply because grocery stores don't think it looks good enough for us to buy.

It doesn't seem fair. It's basically like the "pretty" fruit telling the uglies:

"Grocery-approved" said to the others. GIF from "Mean Girls."

And that's just mean.

Jordan Figueiredo wants us to give all food a chance with his @UglyFruitandVeg campaign.

He thinks the skin-deep standards that decide which fruits and vegetables make the cut at grocery stores just don't make sense. And he's right. Think about it: 30% to 40% of food is wasted (depending on whether you look at post-farmed or pre-farmed). One tomato packing house can fill dump trucks with 22,000 pounds of rejected tomatoes every 40 minutes. And a citrus-packer estimates that as much as 50% of the produce they handle is unmarketable but totally edible.

Estimates show that 1 in 7 Americans do not have reliable access to nutritious, affordable food. Meanwhile, we're throwing out sexy radishes?

Figueiredo thinks we can do better.

He wants us to stop using arbitrary standards to dictate what looks good enough to eat. That's why he's using Instagram and Twitter accounts to share submissions of rejected fruits and vegetables, amusingly referred to as "uglies." I'm sure it's meant as a term of endearment.

OOH LA LA DAIKON! #LegsForDays #WorkItVeg! Pic from http://t.co/KEOZP24uJl
A photo posted by The @UglyFruitAndVeg Campaign (@uglyfruitandveg) on


I'M WEIRD. BUT IT'S OKAY by @jenyeepastry on Twitter #UglyIsWeird #LoveUglyFood #GloveBerry cc @fwscout
A photo posted by The @UglyFruitAndVeg Campaign (@uglyfruitandveg) on
THE POTATOES ARE FULL OF LOVE @williamsonsfarm #AllWeNeedIsSpud
A photo posted by The @UglyFruitAndVeg Campaign (@uglyfruitandveg) on






Let's be real. When it comes to nutrition, looks don't really matter — it's what's on the inside that counts. (Ya know, like with people?)

This concept is far from new. In 2013, a supermarket's Inglorious fruits and vegetables campaign in France proved so successful that the availability of uglies for purchase quickly shot up throughout Europe.

Agree that we shouldn't waste perfectly good food just because it doesn't look "pretty" enough? You can take action.

Figueiredo teamed up with culinary nutritionist Stefanie Sacks to ask Walmart and Whole Foods to start selling these one-of-a-kind fruits and vegetables. Check out their petition and sign if you feel so inclined.

Reducing food losses by just 15% would provide enough food to feed an additional 25 million Americans every year. Now that's something beautiful.

From Your Site Articles
Badge
Acuvue
Acuvue
Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less
social media
Family

Mom who packs her child a meal when going out to restaurants has parents fired up

Does she have a good point?

via UnbreakableMomma/TikTok

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
parenting
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
movies
Pop Culture

Man's 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' lifeline call to dad is still thrilling 24 years later

This might be the greatest game show moment ever.

@Steve_Perrault/Twitter

Some moments never get old.

On November 19, 1999, a man named John Carpenter made game show history and quite possibly gave us all the greatest game show moment of all time.

Carpenter was a contestant on the very first season of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” shot in America. Hosted by the late Regis Philbin, the quiz show featured three "lifeline" options to help them with difficult questions, the most popular being able to “Phone-a-Friend.”

Carpenter had impressively not used a single lifeline for any of his questions. That is, until question 15. The million-dollar question, to be exact.

Keep ReadingShow less
video
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

KCEN|YouTube

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
love
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

WFAA|YouTube

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less
kid hero
Pop Culture

In a touching, unscripted moment, Drew Barrymore rushes to comfort a crying audience member

"Are you okay?"

via Eva Rinaldi/Flickr

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less
drew barrymore
Trending Stories