"You eat with the eyes first" is a common cross-cultural idiom. I'm not saying it justifies the waste, just that it's probably an evolved human behavior that we're stuck catering to. At least there is a counter-culture ugly produce movement right now.

I think that increasing the unit price of produce would reduce pressure on farmers to optimize for volume. A lot of the waste is a result farmers optimizing volume over nutritional quality because the market doesn't really have a place for "top-shelf" produce currently.

Vegetables can vary by an order of magnitude in nutritional density based on growing and harvest conditions. I wish there was a way to pay 10x for vegetables that are reliably 10x more nutritionally dense (as verified by laboratory analysis of random samples from every harvest).