Veg Box Shame
Social researcher Professor Brené Brown’s entire career has been dedicated to uncovering sources of shame in unexpected areas of our lives.
Working in the seemingly straightforward world of fresh fruit and vegetables it came as a shock to us at Fair Food when the phenomenon known as Veg Box Shame or VBS was first revealed in 2020.
Veg Box Shame, is feelings of inadequacy and guilt around not being able to use all the produce in your weekly Veg Box.
It originated around the turn of the millennium when veggie co-ops & farm box schemes began using the internet as a vehicle for managing business with their members.
The co-ops and farmers, who had always sold produce in set boxes, started putting them up for sale on their new websites.
A wave of new customers experiencing online grocery shopping for the first time found that if they wanted to buy produce from these sites it was going to come by the box.
Veg Boxes were never meant to be a mainstream produce solution – originally they were a cheap way for small motivated groups of people to get hold of fruit and veg at wholesale prices.
The trade-off for the cheap produce was a lack of choice and often an overabundance requiring creative cooking solutions, preserving strategies and some clever trading with family and friends.
For many the Veg Box was an adventure; the culinary challenge of turning an ad-hoc seasonal surprise into a week’s scrumptious sustenance.
For others however, it was the Veg Box’s inflexibility and inevitable waste that sowed the seeds of shame.
And so as the popularity of online shopping grew Veg Box casualties were inevitable, as was the accompanying negative feedback.
For CERES Fair Food, which grew out of a staff veggie co-op, our identity was so intertwined with Veg Boxes it seemed inconceivable they could have a dark side.
This collision of perception and reality brought on a personal crisis.
In 2020 I wrote a newsletter talking about my own experience of Veg Box Shame – years of uneaten beetroot and yellowing bok-choi slipped guiltily into our compost all came out.
In the following weeks people emailed or approached me in the street expressing relief that they’re weren’t alone as “failed” Veg Boxers.
Instead of blaming myself I finally stopped ordering my weekly Veg Box and began individually picking the fruit and vegetables my family would actually eat – it was cathartic.
Many other customers came to the same conclusion and four years later in a complete turnaround of trade about two thirds of Fair Food’s produce is bought this way with the remaining third still sold to happy Veg Box fans.
And though things are changing for the better, we still come across plenty of people who believe buying produce online means only a weekly Veg Box.
This is where your stories come in – you can shine a spotlight on Veg Box Shame and maybe save somebody you know from going through the unnecessary waste and guilt of VBS.
You can find the full range of our pick-your-own produce and Veg Boxes here.
Have a great week
Chris
