Don't shop, adopt (fruit edition).

If you didn't feel guilty enough every time you throw away plastic instead of recycling, well, now you can start feeling guiltier, because by throwing out expired food you are DESTROYING THE PLANET.

But don't worry, because now that fruit, that poor, tenderly harvested, irreplaceable fruit is being rescued!

Danon's Two Good yogurt, named so because it has just two grams of sugar per serving, is here to SAVE THE PLANET by rescuing fruit! And if that sounds silly to you, then you are an Earth-destroying bastard and you don't care. But Danone, Danon's home company, DOES CARE:

Danone North America's Two Good® Yogurt is tackling food waste with the introduction of its Good Save™ product line, wrapping a year of commitment to positive impact for people and the planet for the brand. In partnership with Full Harvest®, Two Good 'Good Save' uses Verified Rescued Produce™ to create lower sugar yogurt products with the goal of reducing food waste at the farm level. The product line is setting the standard for the emerging rescued foods market and is the first dairy product to utilize 100% Verified Rescued Produce™. The initial offering features Meyer Lemons that are 100% verified rescued, with plans to launch additional flavors in 2021 and beyond.

You catch that? They loved the idea of rescuing fruit so much that they trademarked the term Verified Rescued Produce™. Note: The trademark does not mean a government entity looked it over and said, "Yes, by golly, that meets our exacting standards" and stamped it. It just means that they got the USPTO to issue a trademark.

So what is the deal with the great fruit rescue, this Dunkirk evac of fruit, and does this involve PETF (People for the Ethical Treatment of Fruit)?

Full Harvest is a do-gooder outfit that leads off saying that a full one-quarter of all produce in America is wasted. I always find these kinds of assertions questionable. You know the figures are always fudged to make the point stronger. Plus, considering how much we grow in this country, and how much agriculture traditionally goes to waste, I think consuming three-quarters is pretty good. 

If we weren't whacking people over the head to Eat! Fresh! Fruits! and Vegetables! all the time, I think we'd be canning and freezing more, and even less would be wasted. Because fresh stuff rots. Canned vegetables stay good for a very long time. 

I think it's safe to say also that children and teenagers probably count for most of the domestic waste. Someone who lives alone and buys apples will probably try to eat them, however much the siren call of the potato chips tries to lure them away. Parents trying and failing to get healthy food into children is the main cause of refrigerators turning into the hospice of produce, where the bounty of the earth goes to die. 

But Full Harvest is not able to round up the stuff that's perishing in the crisper drawer. So what IS Verified Rescued Produce™?

Verified Rescued Produce® is defined by Full Harvest as produce or its by-product that was grown for human consumption but is determined that it will go to waste at the time of evaluation.

While all Full Harvest produce either falls into surplus or imperfect and is being sold in service of reducing food waste, only some of it can be Verified Rescued™ - meaning that it can be verified that it would have gone to waste at the time of evaluation. Any category of Full Harvest produce above can qualify as Verified Rescued™ if it meets our strict verification requirements at the time of evaluation during our auditing process. When verified by a Full Harvest audit, the produce is officially considered “rescued”, meaning that it reduces food waste, and therefore qualifies for environmental benefits (Water savings and CO2 emissions avoidance).  

So... I'm eating garbage? What was so weird about the Meyer lemons that Two Good rescued that they were considered unmarketable? Now I'm a little scared.

Some people think we need to make supermarkets give away any food that's going to waste, but there are downsides to that that the commies never consider. For one thing, a big food giveaway every day would mean fewer customers and more freeloaders, so fewer people paying the freight. But say we took that step by force of law. Then the commies ask: "Why not give it all away from the get-go?" Because you can never do enough for those people, and they never think through the logical consequences of their demands. The Verified Experience of Communism™ proves again and again that giving stuff away leads to scarcity for everyone, but despite the vast human experience in this experiment, they cannot or will not understand why. 

In a way, rescuing fruit in a way nothing new. The huge Tropicana plant in Bradenton, Florida, not only uses four billion oranges annually to make juice, they also turn the peels into useful products like perfume ingredients and cattle feed. Capitalism is supposedly wasteful, but in fact it is way better at recycling than communism, because capitalists want to make a buck off everything they can. 

But back to the Two Good product. Is Two Good any good?

Yeah, it's a quality yogurt, as Danon stuff tends to be. But I have to say the lemon flavor is not very strong. Maybe they need to rescue MORE fruit. Maybe too many Meyer lemons are still losing their lives for nothing. DO BETTER, DANONE! 

Anyway, I hate being lectured with my food. I'm going back to the store brand.