March 2011
Pesticides and Blemishes - they really go hand-in-hand.
I have lived in Far North Queensland for a year now and have watched the various crops being sown, managed and then harvested.
I have also seen how last years wet weather created many problems for those who are trying to keep fruit and vegetable crops free of pests, so they may have more saleable product.
When we walk into the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket, how many times do we pick up the fruit and look for spots or blemishes and then pick the fruit that has none?
Does it change the flavour? Not really, but we seem to have an ingrained perception that blemishes equal poor quality.
Producers are using pesticides, it is a well known fact, but many of us never really stop to wonder why they use them.
Yes, it is to keep out the insects, but it is also to ensure that they have a consistent and saleable product that we, the consumer, will want to purchase.
If we were happy to buy fruit and vegetables that had blemishes, producers would be happy to sell you a product that had not been sprayed with pesticides. It would mean their cost of production would decrease dramatically.
However, without the use of pesticides, producers run the risk of having crops infested with various insects and weeds, affecting both the quantity and quality of the product.
This then translates back to either discounts for their product or an unsaleable product.
I recently attended a conference in the USA and one of the topics was “Feeding the Global Population.”
This seems to be a recurring theme at the moment and really leads to some thinking. We have nearly 7 billion people in the world now and this will increase to 8 billion by 2030.
The greatest opportunity for increased food production is in the Americas and Oceania, which means Australia has a great opportunity to boost production and feed this growing population.
What we often do not think about is the amount of food we currently dispose of due to consumers simply being worried about a few black spots on a product.
If we really want to be serious about feeding the world, we need to think about what we are doing to our producers at home.
It is completely acceptable to want quality, but in food production it is hard to get uniformity, and I believe we confuse the two.
It is all in our perception of the product.
For example, in Australia it seems we prefer eggs with brown shells, whereas in Europe, they prefer eggs with white shells.
There are no differences in the way the eggs taste, it is simply a perception that we have created in Australia that for an egg to taste good it must have a brown shell. It is the same for fruit.
While it may have a few blemishes on the surface, that doesn’t necessarily translate to a poor quality product on the inside.
I have mentioned before that producers rarely engage in a management practice that is not dedicated to ensuring the quality of the end product to meet consumers’ needs. This is the same for pesticide use- producers would prefer to not use them but, as we demand a high quality and consistent product, they often have no choice if they wish to remain profitable in the long run.
Kiri Broad