Impact

BEAUTIFUL FRUIT REDEMPTIONS

These fruits are changing the world, right now. At first blush, many say they are ugly, as they are misshapen, they’ve fallen, or have confounding skins and flesh, but look deeper and you’ll celebrate the results of their beauty.

INGLORIOUS FRUITS & VEGETABLES

Every year, over 300 million tons of fruits and vegetables are thrown away purely because they don’t look “perfect” enough to sell. That means billions of dollars of nutritious food is getting wasted while, at the same time, so many people in the world are starving and malnourished.

Intermarche, one of the largest supermarket chains in France, decided to make a change, coinciding with the European Union's designation of 2104 as the European Year against Food Waste.

They launched the “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign, which promoted the beauty of oddly shaped produce.

“Hideous Orange,” “Ugly Carrot,” and “Grotesque Apple” were among the inglorious. The beautiful thing is, inglorious proved to be a big success, for Internarche, the community it serves, and farmers.

FALLING FRUIT

Resembling the average GoogleMap, FallingFruit.org offers a comprehensive, easy way to find free fruit.

Falling Fruit facilitates relationships between neighborhoods, people, and the natural organisms that surround them. The app identifies areas where fruits have fallen from trees and bushes, and lay waiting to be eaten.

Most fallen fruits are devoured by animals and organisms. But, if people know where to find them, these fruits offer free, delicious nutrition to people who might otherwise have little or no access to fresh foods.

FallingFruit’s database helps foragers, gardeners, “freegans,” and foresters with more than 6,700 crowdsourced entries so far. The site also encourages both growers and gatherers to distribute any extra produce to charities.

Check out more about Falling Fruit and other foraging stories in our post, New Food: Beautiful, Wild & Free.

GLOBAL BREADFRUIT

Its name is breadfruit, and though it is a fruit, when cooked, it tastes like - that’s right: bread. This prickly, large, green football at first glance seems fictitious, but that’s only because most of us have never come across it and it is among the least commercialized of crops. Why? Because it only thrives in the world’s most tropic of habitats, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and therefore hasn’t had its time to shine just yet.

Global Breadfruit is an organization focused on bringing the beautiful outcomes that breadfruit can provide to the hungry in many impoverished nations by planting breadfruit trees and teaching locals how to maintain and harvest from them. Most recently, they have planted breadfruit orchards in Liberia.

The trees are extremely easy to grow, requiring little care except for occasional pruning. Each breadfruit tree is capable of providing for a family of four for 50 years. If this could be scaled, it could have a tremendous impact on reducing poverty and hunger.

Up until now, large scale propagation has been impossible. However, one of Global Breadfruits’ most recent successes was the creation of a reliable method.

Building on the work of another organization, the Breadfruit Institute, Global Breadfruit was able to produce young trees capable of fruiting 2-3 years after plantation, making Breadfruit a more feasible food source. With luck, the spread of this fruit will make a serious impact in the fight against world hunger.

These breadfruit tree-planting projects can help alleviate hunger and support sustainable agriculture, agroforestry, and income generation. Most of the world's one billion hungry people live in the tropics—the same region where breadfruit can be grown.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Fruits in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 07.20.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!