12/22/06 Why and why not to eat fruit

Roger Harker with New Zealands HortResearch recently talked about new research into consumers fruit eating habits and the finds are interesting. HARKER: This represents 3000, quite a big study and about 1/3 of the study were consumers that said they didn't eat enough fruit. They knew they should eat 2 or more a day but they would quite like to eat more fruit. And I think this will be pretty much the same all over the western world myself so this is an enormous market for us. People that want to eat more fruit but can't. Harker explains what he means by people who can't eat fruit. HARKER: And if you look at the reasons and the excuses they don't do it they say it costs too much. I don't think that is particularly true, I don't think the value proposition particularly in terms of the wastage of fruit and we find in New Zealand, and I think it will be the same here, that about 50 percent of consumers will throw away fruit once a fortnight if not more often. A fortnight is a two week period. He says one of the biggest challenges for the fruit industry is just getting fruit into the home. HARKER: Over the next decade there's going to be a lot of pressure on people to eat more fruit coming from governments, it'll come from health professionals so just actually getting fruit into the home is a really important one. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.