In the United States, we waste approximately 30-40% of our food supply, or approximately 133 billion pounds of food. While some of this is caused by storage issues or over-purchasing, up to 20% of produce waste is perfectly good food considered too ugly for Americans to purchase.
Kacy Kim, an associate professor at Bryant University, recently published a study in the journal Psychology & Marketing with an adorable solution to the food waste problem: googly eyes.
As reported in Grist:
Kim's team argues that the problem is that supermarkets, and even "ugly" food specialty companies, are going about it all wrong. It's not about discounting irregular produce to try and get people to buy it, it's about making that produce appealing enough that it doesn't need to be discounted in the first place. That's where the googly eyes come in.
"By testing and adding some human characteristics, we examine whether that effort will increase the attractiveness of the produce, and [whether] that attractiveness is going to be increasing the purchasing of the produce and consuming of the produce," said Kim.
Kim's team found that giving ugly produce human names like Taylor or Jordan also made it more appealing. Anthropomorphism for the win! While a weird-looking apple named "Jordan" with googly eyes sounds cute, it does raise the question of how to dispose of all the googly eyes.
Previously: Chinese restaurant busted for dumpling-eating challenge due to food waste
