Veggies and voting: What your produce basket says about your ballot

Do you turn up your nose at weirdly shaped tomatoes at your local farmers market in favor of beautifully round specimens at your nearby supermarket? Do you steer clear of carrots with “legs” or squarish strawberries, opting instead for Instagram-worthy beauties?

Your feelings about imperfect fruits and vegetables – distinctly “different” in shape, color or texture – just might align with your political ideology.

In what at first seems like an odd correlation, researchers have found a relationship between one's enthusiasm for ugly fruit and one’s decisions in the voting booth.

Generally, people who don’t mind off-looking produce – albeit still edible and nutritious – are more likely to identify as liberal, the research shows. Those who want something that appears less unusual tend toward the conservative side.

It boils down to one's willingness to veer from expectations, explains Associate Professor Jayati Sinha of the department of marketing and logistics at FIU Business.

“In a food context, we have some norms,” she says of what consumers, especially in the United States, anticipate finding on display. “When we look at fruits and vegetables, people expect to see that they are aesthetically pleasing.”

Any deviation, then, represents a change from the baseline and gives rise to uncertainty, which in this case brings into question aspects such as taste and nutritional benefits.

To be accepting of a departure from the norm, Sinha and her co-investigators write in the scientific journal Appetite, “requires an openness to new experiences that is more likely a liberal than a conservative response.”

Previous studies have shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives are more reluctant to eat unfamiliar food and show less interest in organic offerings and plant-based meat. Conservatives also tend to express a preference for an omnivore diet over a vegetarian diet.

Neither way of thinking – or approaching the produce aisle –  is in itself correct or incorrect, Sinha cautions.

The 1,400 study participants self-identified as liberal or conservative, completed two accepted measures of political ideology or did both. They then indicated their likelihood of purchasing a box of imperfect fruits and vegetables, which was pictured with clearly labeled discount pricing and a USDA logo to signify overall good quality, physical defects aside.

Sinha and her collaborators, from universities in the United States and abroad, took up the study due to an interest in the topic of food waste. The global problem exists at a time when as many as 2.33 billion people experience moderate or severe food insecurity, according to the World Health Organization.

One estimate suggests that in the U.S. as much as 20% of all fruits and vegetables are thrown away because of cosmetic irregularities, resulting in both lost nutrition and a waste of the resources required to grow them. Much of that represents produce that never arrives to market, Sinha says, because producers, wholesalers or retailers preemptively deem it unsellable.

When formulating their study – in 2020, during the last U.S. presidential election cycle - the researchers collectively recognized growing political polarization at home and abroad. They then posited that personal political ideology could exert an influence on the purchase of something as relatively affordable and universally important to health as fruits and vegetables.

As they write in the journal article, “Political ideology exerts profound influence not only on how people interpret social events but also the choices they make in their everyday lives.”

Apparently, that trickles down even to paying for a deformed red pepper.

Sinha hopes the study’s contribution to understanding consumers’ personal identities, and thus their behavior, will spark solutions for retailers stuck with produce to which customers give the side eye.

The most obvious is to lower prices, something many grocers already do. Emphasizing nutritional value and tastiness should also help. Another tactic, although less scalable, Sinha adds: reroute the mutant eggplants to farmers markets as customers there will often overlook oddities to support small and local producers.

So, what might all this mean in the coming weeks as Americans go to the polls? Could one reliably discern how a friend or neighbor plans to vote in the presidential election simply by looking at the contents of a grocery basket?

“Of course,” says the professor, who correlates purchases of all kinds with political attitude, “you can definitely do that!”