New Zealand apple sits in my Minnesotan hand. From seeds germinated, the apple grew in a New Zealand field, was picked with busy hands, packed into a tight box, put on a truck, placed on an airplane, driven from the airport on dirty trucks to a Whole Foods distributor, transported to the Whole Foods on Grand Ave., put on the shelf in an attractive display with its sisters and brothers, disregarded by choosy Whole Foods customers, taken off of the shelf by young exploited workers because of its one small brown spot that had developed, thrown into an outside gray dumpster and picked out of the top of the dumpster by me. A New Zealand apple sits in my Minnesotan hand.

The United States has a hot and steamy love affair with trash. While the United States has about six percent of the world population, it produces a far greater percentage of the world’s waste. The politics of waste disposal are so ironic that it would be a great comedy plot if it weren’t so tragic. Upper class—mostly white—people creating tons of waste, destroying a local habitat by building a landfill and then creating a golf course over the landfill. White people stealing Native American land, ripping up the land to produce power to create a wasteful society, and then storing the energy waste—nuclear fuel—in Native American reservations. Lower class—mostly people of color—having to live next to landfills and dumps that are filled with “trash” that they could have used.

How is it possible that this tasty New Zealand apple traveled thousands of miles only to become “trash” in a dumpster in Minnesota? Why isn’t this food made available to people that could really use it? First, I believe that part of the answer to this question is based on dominant absurd ideas about food presentation that pervade our society. The great majority of people in the UnitedStates have been so indoctrinated by the idea of the ideal fruit or vegetable that they do not recognize how constructed this ideal really is. Briefly working on an organic farm in California this summer made me realize how much food goes to waste on organic farms as a result of idealist shoppers who don’t want a slight bruise on their tomatoes. I don’t think that most consumers realize how many other fruits and vegetables have to be discarded in order to maintain the myth of the ideal fruit or vegetable.

I believe that a major force that has been at the root of the myth of the “perfect produce” is non-organic farming. Through non-organic farming’s utilization of cancerous chemicals embedded in the fertilizer and sprayed on the weeds and plants these farms are able to more easily produce these ideal fruits and veggies than the organic farms. This certainly is not to say that organic farming does not also produce ideal produce, but it is to say that certain produce—such as apples—is much more difficult to keep bugs out of through organic methods than with the use of dangerous pesticides.

Second, beyond consumers’ promotion of the myth of the perfect produce, there clearly exist serious institutional shortcomings in the United States in regard to food distribution. When there are such vast quantities of people in the United States who go to bed hungry every night is it not completely absurd that there is such an abundance of food that goes to waste in our country as a whole, our local Twin Cities community, and at Macalester itself every day? How ridiculous is it that two of the best dumpster diving places in the Twin Cities are located in one of the most affluent parts of the Twin Cities? While a number of Twin Cities businesses give some of their produce to local charities, the plethora of quality food that sits in the dumpsters at just Whole Foods and Breadsmiths every night clearly indicates the need for some major organizing around getting the “unsellable” food to the people that need it.

Third, I believe that one of the reasons why there is a lack of more institutionalized food distribution is the “fear factor” for business owners. There are a number of public health codes that business owners have to follow that greatly restrict what they can give away. Therefore, many business owners—who fear that they will be sued or shut down for violating public health codes—do not organize ways of distributing their “unsellable” food products.

I do not believe that the public health codes are unfounded, but I do believe that there are ways of working within the codes and around them in order to distribute quality food to those people in need. Why not gather the food in cars and distribute it to people? Or bring people to the dumpsters? While these actions are extremely important, it is also imperative that we as a society begin to critically address issues of food distribution. And of course the approach should be transnational in its fundamental basis. The systems that have created the existence of malnourished and wasteful to live side-by-side have also contributed to worldwide inequalities in who has access to food. And we can begin to address this global phenomenon locally — from the dumpsters on Grand Ave. to the plates of food that we take at Café Mac the conditions of possibility lie for radically changing food distribution in the world.