Pulls (rhymes with gulls). There's an app for that!

When I was a kid, apples with a bruise or rot spot on them were called "pulls." Which rhymes with "hulls," "gulls", "trulls." 

I don't know if this term is particular to New England, Massachusetts, Worcester, or my family. Is it Irish (c.f., my father)? Is it German (c.f., my mother)? I don't know whether I've ever heard anyone else use the word, and The Google came up with nada.

Until the other evening, I had a few "pulls" in my fridge, leftovers from a trip to the orchard last fall. Things last a good long while in my fridge, which is quite excellent. So the "pulls" weren't awful-awful. Not great for eating-eating, but okay on a peanut butter sandwich. And perfectly fine for apple sauce, which I made up a batch of, making space in the fruit drawer for more fruit, including some non-"pulls."

This is exactly what my mother would have done if she'd found herself with a bunch of "pulls", back in the day when we didn't waste a lot of food. No one did. Something had to be really over the brink before my mother tossed it out. Garbage - which was wrapped up in newspaper and tied with twine - consisted mostly of eggshells, banana and orange peels, chicken bones, and coffee grounds. Apple cores, too, but there was seldom much left of that apple. (When my father was a kid, when someone was eating an apple, the first kid to call "coresies" got to munch on the core. Yum!)

Oh, I'm sure that occasionally there was a dab of something that "wasn't worth saving", and that my mother threw out, but not much. We ate leftovers until there were no more leftovers. 

Personally, I don't waste a lot of food. Before I got my quite excellent fridge, I used to waste more. Way back in the day, I had a fridge on its last legs that was so tropical-jungle humid that it could turn a perfectly good cucumber into a suppurating mass of gloop within minutes, but my current fridge is a keeper. 

So I'm pretty good about not letting things go to waste. 

I like having leftovers, and consume them with great relish until there is nothing left to consume. Once in a while, there's a piece or two of too-stale bread, or moldy cheese, that needs to go. And try as I do to use up that bunch of basil, parsley, or dill, most of what I throw out is herb-ish.

I might not be much of a food waster, but I've seen numbers floating around like 80 billion tons, 100 billion tons, thrown away in the US each year. An astonishing 40% of the food supply. 

Most of this isn't coming from us individuals throwing away parsley that's gone soupy. It's coming from stores, restaurants, and farms.

But now there are companies stepping up to help steer surplus food into our fridges and pantries before it rots.

At Red Apple Farm’s stand inside the Boston Public Market, hungry passersby can pick up a “surprise bag” of misshapen doughnuts, minidoughnuts, bruised apples, or just leftover food for about one-third of retail cost. (Source: Boston Globe)

Red Apple is selling about 100 bags each month, and they're doing it by using:

...the app Too Good To Go, which sells surplus food from restaurants and other suppliers directly to customers at a fraction of its normal price.

This is a great idea, especially given that food banks won't typically take pre-cooked food, and most won't take canned goods that are past their expiration date - even though, as we all know, those canned goods are perfectly fine for a good long time beyond that sell by/use by date. Some food banks don't have much by way of refrigeration, so can't accept dairy or fresh foods that need to stay cool. 

Then there's OLIO, which lets people nearby know when you're tossing out food - "home-cooked, home-grown," whatever - that's still got some life in it. Today, OLIO, which has been around now for six years:

...serves 4.3 million users globally and has shared 25 million portions of food plus 3 million nonfood items.

(Due to the pandemic, OLIO "pivoted to no-contact pickups.") 

There's also a delivery service, Imperfect Foods, that specializes in 

...saving foods considered unsellable, often because of physical deformities that don’t impact taste or nutritional value.

“We find product that’s too big, too small, too large, has a little blemish, maybe had some weather damage, like a sun-kissed cauliflower or a little yellowing on the kale or some spots on an apple,” said Maddy Rotman, the company’s head of sustainability. “And we make sure that food has a home.”

Imperfect started out with fruits and veggies. Then they added in other important food groups like: 

 Chocolate-covered pretzel bits sourced from the broken-off chunks at the bottom of the pack line in a pretzel processing plant.

Hmmm. That sounds good. So does the Red Apple surprise bag. Maybe I need to head on over to the Boston Public Market and buy myself a goody bag. Hope mine has minidoughnuts...