B.C. farm’s ‘Ugly Potato Day’ feeds thousands as police called for traffic control

For more than 100 years, the Heppell family has been growing food on their Surrey, B.C., farm.

For the past 13 years, they have been hosting Ugly Potato Day for anyone who wants to come down and receive a few potatoes and squash that they cannot sell to the stores.

“An ugly potato can be defined as a potato that doesn’t meet the cosmetic standards of the stores or it has really different sizing,” farmer Tyler Heppell told Global News.

“Maybe it’s way too large or way too small, and we build up a big stock of it and we can’t move it fast enough through the stores.”

Heppell said North America has some of the strictest cosmetic standards for food.

“In the grocery stores you go anywhere in the world, it’s, everything’s fair game,” he said. “My grandpa always said that because we’ve never gone through a world war here, we don’t really know hard times, and we’re just the picky eaters.”

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Heppell said the farm likes to help alleviate some of the strain on the food banks by offering up food they cannot sell.

Anything they can’t sell, they end up giving them to the cows or the pigs.

This year the Heppell farm had about 35,000 pounds of potatoes, about 20,000 pounds of carrots, 2,000 pounds of beets and 5,000 pounds of squash to give away to anyone who is in need. Heppell said three farms came together to take part this year and they encourage everyone to leave a donation for the local food bank if they can.

However, so many people showed up that Surrey RCMP had to be called to help manage the traffic chaos.

Metro Vancouver estimates 13,000 tonnes of edible, healthy food is thrown out every year in the region.

“Everyone showed up. It was crazy,” Heppell said.

“But a lot of elderly who are really struggling to make ends meet. A lot of people that rely on food banks already came and just used it to load up to have enough food for the holiday season.”

Heppell said it was interesting to hear people’s stories but at the same time, it was heartbreaking.

“How many people are living paycheque to paycheque and really have one nostril under the water,” he said.

“So it was just a really special day. Everyone’s so grateful coming out and we were able to raise $5,500 for our local food banks.”

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