<story><title>Most “ugly” produce gets turned into soups, sauces, salsa, jam</title><url>https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1086055092321697794</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feross</author><text>&amp;gt; The &amp;quot;eat ugly fruit!&amp;quot; movement is classist as FUCK. You&amp;#x27;ve got to have a debilitating level of ignorance to assume that if Whole Paycheck Market doesn&amp;#x27;t stock ugly fruit, it must be getting &amp;quot;wasted.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to not know much about the agricultural industry without being &amp;quot;classist as fuck.&amp;quot; There are an infinite number of things one can learn about and a finite amount of time. While the content is interesting, I find the condescending tone off-putting.&lt;p&gt;Are there advantages to this communication style that I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>I think what this quote is responding to is people disseminating some first world millennial&amp;#x27;s first uninformed guess about an issue as if were a revolution and a blessing to the world, instead of stopping to think that their precious intellectual virtues are not limited to people of their class, education, and supposed intelligence.&lt;p&gt;The idea that our enlightened attitudes set us apart from the rest of unwashed humanity is &lt;i&gt;our&lt;/i&gt; fake news -- the stuff we consume unreflectively because it flatters us and plays nicely with our prejudices.  Presented in a neutral context, the idea that the agricultural industry was throwing away significant quantities of produce because of aesthetic flaws would meet a lot of skepticism.  Presented in the context of &lt;i&gt;you are special because you understand how wrong this practice is&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;special people like us can help save the world by fixing this problem&lt;/i&gt; the idea gets uncritically accepted and widely shared on social media.&lt;p&gt;Calling people &amp;quot;classist as fuck&amp;quot; is designed to startle and threaten exactly the people who tend to accept these narratives uncritically, and put them in a frame of mind to consider that they might be wrong.  Whatever the truth of the issue is, we won&amp;#x27;t get there unless we stop seeing ourselves as the hero of the story.</text></comment>
<story><title>Most “ugly” produce gets turned into soups, sauces, salsa, jam</title><url>https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1086055092321697794</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feross</author><text>&amp;gt; The &amp;quot;eat ugly fruit!&amp;quot; movement is classist as FUCK. You&amp;#x27;ve got to have a debilitating level of ignorance to assume that if Whole Paycheck Market doesn&amp;#x27;t stock ugly fruit, it must be getting &amp;quot;wasted.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to not know much about the agricultural industry without being &amp;quot;classist as fuck.&amp;quot; There are an infinite number of things one can learn about and a finite amount of time. While the content is interesting, I find the condescending tone off-putting.&lt;p&gt;Are there advantages to this communication style that I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeswin</author><text>I guess the author was upset that a great many people parroted the &amp;#x27;ugly fruits get disposed&amp;#x27; line without doing any research. I might have mentioned it myself, because it was all over the news.
I can understand why someone who works in the industry would find this frustrating - it&amp;#x27;s basically just fake news and the damage is real. A rebuttal would get nowhere near the press the sensationalist original story would get.&lt;p&gt;The lesson from this is - share stories only within your area of expertise.</text></comment>