In a Pickle & Loving It

Kayla Abe and David Murphy, founders of The Ugly Pickle Company, are tackling the problem of food waste one delicious jar at a time.

- NEIL ZEVNIK

When I was a small child in the postwar ’50s, the concept of “food waste” was simple and self-evident: you ate everything on your plate, because “starving children in Europe” would love to be as fortunate as you. And dinner often consisted of assorted “leftovers,” so that nothing edible was discarded.

Decades later, “food waste” is an international topic, an intractable and complicated problem with serious negative effects on society and the environment. According to the USDA, consumer waste is the most significant component, and the United States is one of the worst offenders. Every year, we waste 30–40% of our food supply, throwing away 80 billion pounds of food, 94 percent of which ends up in landfills, creating methane gas and hastening global warming.

One peculiarly American idiosyncrasy is the need for produce that looks “perfect,” resulting in the rejection of tons of perfectly nutritious food for cosmetic reasons. And that’s where Kayla Abe and David Murphy come in. Their idea? To utilize that less-than-perfect produce to create a desirable product and initiate a dialogue about food responsibility at a grass-roots level.

DON’T JUDGE A BOOK