An apple can be perfectly good to eat and still fail the test for being good enough to sell.
How much does that difference influence the way our food is grown — and the pesticides farmers use to grow it?
Imagine two apples picked from the same orchard.
They are the same variety. They taste much the same. They contain the same nutrients. Both are perfectly edible.
But one has smooth, unmarked skin.
The other has a blemish.
Which one belongs on the supermarket shelf?
For most of us, the answer probably seems obvious. We have become accustomed to rows of apples that look remarkably alike. Carrots are straight. Potatoes fall within familiar sizes. Lettuce leaves aren’t supposed to have holes in them. Fruit should be clean, evenly coloured and largely unmarked.
But there is another question hiding behind all that beautiful produce.
What does a farmer have to do to grow food that looks like that?
And, more specifically:
How much of the pesticide use involved in producing our food is necessary to make food edible — and how much is necessary to make it commercially acceptable?
It is a question closely related to another we recently explored: Do Farmers Grow Food Differently When They Are Going to Eat It Themselves? That investigation found evidence that, in some circumstances, farmers do treat food grown for their own households differently from food grown for market.
The answer turns out to be much more complicated than blaming supermarkets for wanting perfect fruit.
It also turns out to be much more interesting.
When Perfectly Good Food Isn’t Good Enough To Sell
Farmers don’t simply grow food.
They grow food for markets.
And those markets can have requirements concerning size, colour, shape, blemishes, pest damage, disease, maturity, shelf life, storage, residues and many other characteristics.
New Zealand’s current Grocery Supply Code formally recognises this relationship. Retailers can establish fresh-produce standards and quality specifications, although the Code requires those specifications to be reasonable and clearly communicated to suppliers. Produce that fails the relevant specifications can be rejected.
That doesn’t tell us that a particular supermarket demands a perfectly straight carrot or an unblemished apple.
But it does establish something important.
There is a point between the farm and our shopping trolley at which being edible is no longer the only test.
New Zealand Good Agricultural Practice (NZGAP) describes the same commercial reality from the grower’s side. It says growers seeking market access must demonstrate compliance with food-safety, environmental and quality-assurance requirements, and that its programmes cover different domestic and international market requirements, including requirements tailored to retailers.
Those requirements matter because the difference between making the grade and missing it can be the difference between a premium return, a lower-value market — or no viable market at all.
And sometimes the thing that makes the difference is little more than a mark on the skin.
New Zealand Apples Provide A Remarkable Example
Apples are particularly useful for understanding this because New Zealand researchers have been studying the relationship between pests, pesticides and commercial standards for decades.
Leafrollers are small moths whose caterpillars can feed on leaves and fruit.
A 2006 study of New Zealand apple orchards described why these insects had acquired such importance in commercial apple production.
Their high pest status, the researchers wrote, was mainly associated with zero tolerance in export crops and the requirement for blemish-free fruit.
The paper also noted that intensive insecticide use had contributed to insecticide resistance in leafrollers.
Think about what that means.
The insect isn’t necessarily turning an apple into something nobody could eat.
It may be turning it into something somebody won’t buy.
The apple hasn’t suddenly become less edible. It has become less saleable.
And once the commercial value of an apple depends upon preventing that damage, preventing the damage becomes part of the farmer’s job.
That can influence pesticide decisions.
Researchers Have Actually Measured “Cosmetic” Pesticide Use
This isn’t merely a theory.
In 2024, researchers from ETH Zurich published a study in Agricultural Economics with an unusually direct title:
Spraying for the beauty: Pesticide use for visual appearance in apple production.
The researchers surveyed 196 commercial apple growers in Switzerland and specifically investigated pesticide use intended to improve the visual appearance of table apples rather than simply prevent losses in production.
The results were striking.
Some 23.5% of the growers reported using pesticides mainly for the visual appearance of the fruit, while 59.2% reported using chemical thinning for apple size and colour development.
But perhaps the most interesting finding wasn’t simply that cosmetic pesticide use existed.
It was who was more likely to use it.
Farms selling predominantly through intermediaries were 29.6% more likely to use cosmetic pesticides for visual purposes than farms selling mainly directly to consumers. They were also 23.9% more likely to use chemical thinning for visual purposes.
Those farms were also more likely to have visual requirements written into contracts and produced a higher proportion of premium and Class 1 apples meeting stricter appearance criteria.
That raises a fascinating possibility.
Perhaps the further food travels through the commercial system, the more important its appearance becomes.
A farmer selling you apples directly at a farm gate can explain that the little mark on the skin doesn’t matter.
An apple travelling through packhouses, wholesalers, exporters, retailers and supermarket displays doesn’t get to explain itself.
It has to look the part.
But Not Every Pest-Free Apple Is About Appearance
There is an important distinction here.
Sometimes an insect mark really is little more than an insect mark.
Sometimes the insect itself can threaten an export market.
New Zealand’s horticultural exporters operate in a world of phytosanitary rules designed to prevent pests and diseases moving between countries. MPI maintains plant export requirements and Official Assurance Programmes for commodities and markets requiring additional certification.
That is not the same thing as demanding beautiful fruit.
A country trying to prevent a particular pest from entering its environment has a legitimate biosecurity concern regardless of whether consumers care what the apple looks like.
New Zealand apple growers have experienced exactly this problem.
A 2013 New Zealand study of codling moth control described growers as having to satisfy conflicting export-market requirements.
Some markets wanted fruit free of pests.
Others wanted fruit free of pesticide residues.
That creates an extraordinary challenge.
Grow an apple without the pest.
But don’t leave pesticide residues on it either.
Suddenly the story isn’t about supermarkets forcing farmers to spray more.
It is about farmers being squeezed between two different definitions of what an acceptable apple looks like.
Markets Can Push Pesticide Use In Both Directions
This is where the story takes an unexpected turn.
Commercial pressure hasn’t simply encouraged pesticide use.
It has also helped drive pesticide reduction.
That tension also sits behind another question we recently examined: Does Glyphosate Make Food Cheaper — or Just Cheaper to Produce? The economics of pesticide use are not simply about the price consumers pay at the checkout; they also involve the costs, risks and production decisions farmers face before food ever gets there.
New Zealand’s Integrated Fruit Production programme changed the way many apple pests were managed by using monitoring, pest thresholds, biological control, pheromone mating disruption and more selective insecticides rather than relying as heavily on routine broad-spectrum spraying.
In an early New Zealand pilot involving around 88 apple orchards, post-bloom insecticide applications fell by roughly 40–60% compared with conventional programmes.
Later progress was substantial. New Zealand’s Integrated Fruit Production programme increasingly relied on selective pesticides, biological control and pheromone mating disruption rather than the broad-spectrum insecticide programmes that had previously dominated apple pest control.
Growers were still producing premium export apples.
They had changed how they controlled the pests.
The 2013 codling moth study provides a particularly good example. Researchers followed 14 Hawke’s Bay orchards using pheromone mating disruption alongside carefully targeted insecticide use.
Insecticide applications fell from an average of 5.9 per season before mating disruption to 2.3 the following season, later settling at around 3.7, while codling moth damage remained extraordinarily low.
Commercial requirements hadn’t disappeared.
Farmers had found another way of meeting them.
The Perfect Apple May Also Need Almost No Detectable Residue
This creates one of the stranger contradictions in modern food production. A buyer may want fruit without pest damage. An export market may demand fruit free from particular pests. A retailer may want attractive, uniform produce. And increasingly, customers and markets may also want fruit produced with fewer pesticides or carrying extremely low residues.
So the grower can effectively be asked to produce an apple that has:
- no significant pest damage;
- no unacceptable blemishes;
- no prohibited pests;
- the right size and colour;
- sufficient quality to survive storage and transport;
- and as little pesticide residue as possible.
Seen from the orchard, our beautiful supermarket apple starts to look rather different.
It isn’t simply something nature produced.
It is the end result of a complicated series of biological, regulatory and commercial demands that somebody — usually the grower — has somehow had to reconcile.
Some New Zealanders Are Already Buying The Food That Doesn’t Make The Grade
The idea that consumers might accept imperfect fruit and vegetables isn’t hypothetical. Some New Zealand businesses have built their entire model around proving that there is a market for food that doesn’t conform to conventional retail expectations.
Wonky Box works with New Zealand growers to find a home for produce that might otherwise struggle to reach the mainstream market because it is too big, too small, misshapen, marked or simply surplus to requirements. Instead of asking growers to make every carrot, kūmara or piece of fruit look the same, Wonky Box sells the difference as part of the appeal.
Misfit Garden takes a similarly refreshing approach, sourcing surplus and cosmetically imperfect produce directly from New Zealand growers and delivering it to customers who are quite happy to eat food that looks like food rather than a carefully selected display of identical specimens.
There is something worth supporting in both ideas. They give growers another potential outlet for perfectly edible produce, help keep food from going to waste and, perhaps most importantly for this discussion, challenge the assumption that consumers simply won’t buy fruit and vegetables unless they conform to conventional appearance standards.
And every box of crooked carrots, oversized courgettes, unusually shaped kūmara or marked fruit that somebody happily takes home raises an interesting question:
Perhaps consumers aren’t quite as obsessed with perfect-looking food as the conventional food system assumes we are.
What If We Were Happier With Ugly Food?
This brings us back to the question that started all of this.
What if we didn’t care quite so much?
Would farmers sometimes need to intervene less?
The Swiss apple research suggests the answer can genuinely be yes. Its authors concluded that reducing the emphasis on visual product quality could provide an opportunity to reduce pesticide risks without reducing food production.
Other research has reached similar conclusions that at least some pesticide applications are made primarily to protect cosmetic quality rather than yield.
But there is a trap here.
It would be very easy to turn that evidence into another comforting food slogan:
Eat ugly vegetables and farmers can stop spraying pesticides.
The evidence doesn’t support that.
Farmers would still have pests capable of destroying crops. They would still have fungal diseases. They would still need food capable of surviving harvesting, storage and transport. Export growers would still face phytosanitary requirements. And a pest capable of jeopardising access to an overseas market cannot simply be dismissed as a cosmetic problem.
There is also economic research suggesting that changing cosmetic grading standards does not necessarily produce a predictable change in pesticide use. Depending on how produce is graded, priced and marketed, the incentives can operate in unexpected directions.
So we cannot put a number on this.
We cannot say that accepting spotted apples would reduce pesticide use by 10%, 20% or 50%.
But we can say something much more interesting.
Some pesticide use really is influenced by how food looks.
And that means our expectations are part of the agricultural system too.
Do Consumers Really Demand Perfect Food?
There is another uncomfortable question.
Whose standards are these?
It is easy to blame supermarkets.
It is equally easy for supermarkets to say they are simply supplying what customers want.
And consumers certainly do respond to appearance. Studies have repeatedly found that blemishes, unusual shapes and other visual imperfections can reduce people’s willingness to buy fresh produce.
But consumer preferences aren’t fixed laws of nature.
If we spend decades walking into supermarkets where virtually every apple is polished and unblemished, every carrot broadly resembles the carrot beside it and visibly damaged produce has already disappeared somewhere along the supply chain, what happens to our idea of what “normal” food looks like?
Did supermarkets respond to consumers demanding perfect produce?
Or did supermarkets, grading systems, growers, exporters, marketers and consumers gradually create that expectation together?
Perhaps we’ve trained the food system.
Perhaps the food system has trained us.
Most likely, both have happened.
And What About Glyphosate?
There is an important distinction for a campaign concerned with glyphosate.
Most of the direct evidence about cosmetic pesticide use involves insecticides, fungicides and other crop-management chemicals, not glyphosate.
That makes sense.
Glyphosate is principally a herbicide. It controls weeds. It isn’t normally being sprayed because an apple has a blemish or a caterpillar has taken a bite from a leaf.
So this isn’t evidence that prettier supermarket produce means more glyphosate.
It is evidence of something broader.
Agricultural chemical use isn’t determined solely by what is necessary to produce something humans can eat. It can also be shaped by what markets will accept, what exporters can sell, what retailers specify and what consumers choose.
That distinction matters.
What Would Food Look Like If It Only Had To Be Good Enough To Eat?
Perhaps we’ve been asking farmers to solve a problem that partly belongs to the rest of us.
We want affordable food.
We want plentiful food.
We want food available throughout the year.
We want it to survive days or weeks between harvest and consumption.
We don’t want insects in it.
We don’t want diseases on it.
We don’t want pesticide residues on it.
And then, after asking growers to achieve all of that, we stand in the produce aisle and leave the apple with the funny-looking mark behind.
What would happen if we didn’t?
What if carrots could be crooked?
What if potatoes came in more sizes?
What if apples were allowed scars?
What if harmless evidence that an insect once shared the orchard wasn’t automatically regarded as evidence that something had gone wrong?
Would pesticide use fall?
In some circumstances, the evidence suggests it could.
Would pesticides suddenly become unnecessary?
Clearly not.
The more important question may therefore be somewhere between those two extremes.
How many interventions in modern food production are necessary to give us food that is safe, nutritious and plentiful — and how many are necessary to give us food that looks the way we have learned to expect it to look?
An apple can be perfectly good to eat and still not be good enough to sell.
Maybe that tells us something about the apple.
But perhaps it tells us rather more about us.
Image Source & Attribution
We’re grateful to the talented photographers and designers whose work enhances our content. The feature image on this page is by Alexis84.
