In Defense of Ugly Vegetables

Take a second look at that gnarly potato. You might just save the world. 

There is a ritual I observe every Friday when I get home from my morning at the farm. Regardless of how tired, dirty, or hungry I am (generally all three in great measure) the first thing I do is take my enormous bag of fresh vegetables, artfully arrange them on the kitchen table, and take a series of photographs. 

I like to see the colors. It’s a moment to appreciate the gift of produce so fresh, it was literally still in the ground three hours earlier. And other people like to see and appreciate my farm veggies too. If you follow me on my social media accounts, particularly Twitter (sorry Instagram, I’m trying), you’ll notice my Friday farm share posts are among my most well received.

It makes sense. Not only is the produce I’m posting as fresh as it can get, it’s also visually flawless. My farm hours end at noon, but the farm stand doesn’t open until one. I almost always take my share with me before I go home, rather than make a return trip later. That means I’m the first one to pick through the veggies. I always walk away with the leafiest chard, the straightest carrots, the plumpest beets, the roundest tomatoes.

It makes for great photos, but actually, I’m …

Part of the Problem

Food waste in America is an enormous issue. A quick Google search for ‘Food waste in the fields’ will yield an endlessly unspooling thread of articles studded with alarming facts about how much produce never even makes it out of the ground at the farm level. I won’t regurgitate these facts for you, as others have already done it better. I like this article in particular, which suggests that over 50 percent of food in America goes to waste.

50 percent?! But why?!

As the article above suggests, there are a lot of factors that contribute to produce being left in the fields on larger scale commercial farms: lack of labor, weather events, market fluctuations, etc. But even on my small community farm, take a stroll through the fields on an afternoon after a harvest, and you’re likely to see perfectly edible produce just … left behind.

Some of it isn’t edible. This carrot was nibbled by a rabbit, that beet was bored through by an insect. This radish cracked open. That zucchini got so big, it’s internal texture has gone from tender and pleasant to woody and, well … gross.

But some of it—and this is where my weekly photography habit helps put the blame on my shoulders—just isn’t as nice to look at.

An Obsession with Perfection

Have you been to the produce section of a grocery store lately? Picture it: Bulk carrots of uniform size and thickness, glistening with dew from a recent shower courtesy of the overhead misters. Heads of broccoli, entirely uniform, piles of nearly-ripe tomatoes, all the same size. Apples! Shiny, wax-covered apples that glitter like jewels.

These things are enticing. They tell us they are fresh and healthy and delicious. They invite us to load them into plastic produce bags and bring them home and feel so good about what we’re feeding ourselves and our families. And they are healthy. They were also harvested at least a month ago, but that’s a topic for another post.

The problem is, faced with so much perfection, when we rifle through that bin of loose potatoes, we’re conditioned to steer clear of anything with a blemish, or an unusual shape, or any kind of superficial flaw. That potato gets left behind over and over again until, finally, it starts to rot, or gets thrown out because it’s been there too long waiting for someone to take a chance on it. And there’s nothing wrong with it! A little work with a paring knife, and it would fit perfectly in your summer potato salad.

But it’ll never make it to a potato salad. It’ll never get mashed into a healthy, creamy kale colcannon. It’ll never be transformed into light, fluffy gnocchi. 

In the three examples above, the end product would give no hint of how ‘ugly’ the potato was in the store. Because it’s an ingredient, and when we cook, we transform ingredients into something wholly different than they were when we started.

And now, perhaps, you begin to see how so much produce is wasted.

Tough Calls in the Field

I don’t have a statistic to back this up, but I’d be willing to guess that there is less waste on my farm than there is through other agricultural models. It’s the CSA system: you get what you get. Of course, the talented farmers that keep me fed thirty weeks of the year put in a lot of time planning the season’s crops, but the weekly share is very much determined by what is ready to be harvested. 

Weekly, we harvest for 220 shares, plus extra produce to be sold to retail customers. That means, from a particular row of carrots, we need to get at least 220 bunches. If there are seven carrots in a bunch, that means we need over 1500 carrots. On a seven acre farm full of stones (even after nearly 400 years of the land being farmed) there is only so much space to be devoted to carrots, and the chances of pulling out 1500 perfectly straight, entirely uniform carrots is, well … nil.

So we get some knobby ones. We pull twisty ones. Some are longer, and some are shorter. But we still do our best to put together the most perfect bunches we can. This leads to a sliding system of quality control:

Would I eat this? Yes.

Would someone pay for this? I’m not sure.

So we stop. Ask the farmers. Present the ugly vegetable, and get a yes or no.

More often than not, it’s a yes. But there are tough calls.

Have you ever seen two carrots, twisted around one another in a tight embrace? It’s beautiful. It’s hard not to personify them and imagine they were comforting each other in the middle of a particularly bad thunderstorm, or when a razor-toothed rabbit was ravaging the fields. They’re perfectly edible—just as sweet as any other carrot—but inevitably, it is these vegetables that get left behind.

They just don’t make the cut. But imagine for a moment what would happen if we truly believed …

All Vegetables are Created Equal

If, societally, we were more accepting of vegetables that looked a little different, a lot of things might change.

First off, maybe you’d get nine carrots in a bunch. I dare you to argue that more carrots are a bad thing.

Secondly, the overall price of produce could go down. If farmers are pulling ugly produce from the fields anyways, and we as consumers were willing to buy it, produce would be more abundant, which could drive down the cost per piece. If it all still gets sold, farmers aren’t negatively affected, and we live slightly healthier lives because, well … more carrots!

Of course, we’ll never buy all the produce, so having more leftover means even more produce to donate, which goes a long way to reducing food insecurity.

It’s pretty simple, actually: eat ugly produce, and you save the world.

A Challenge

Understanding the problem is only part of the solution. Reducing food waste because of cosmetically imperfect vegetables requires action. So here is my challenge to you:

Next time you’re at the grocery store, or the farm stand, or the farmers market, go ahead and rifle through those bins for the perfect tomato. But take an imperfect one too. I guarantee, if it’s made it to the bin, it’s safe to eat. I also guarantee, it’ll taste exactly the same as the ‘perfect’ one.

And if every consumer in America took one piece of imperfect produce every time they shopped … I can’t even begin to imagine the impact.

I’ll do my part too. I’ll keep some of those discarded carrots and rescue them from the field. I’ll take the chard that has a few holes in the leaves. And while I’ll still post pictures of my beautiful Friday morning bounties, I’m also going to try to photograph more imperfect produce as we pull it from the ground. Because it’s beautiful and wild and natural and delicious.

And perfectly normal.

Share your thoughts! Do you constantly search for the perfect tomato? What is the wildest looking fresh vegetable you’ve ever seen? If reducing food waste is important to you, what steps do you already take to affect positive change? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks as always for reading,

Gregory