Misshapen fruits and vegetables3/11/2023 They end up on Instagram.Asda recently launched a ‘Wonky Veg Box’ full of enough crooked carrots and knobbly potatoes to feed a family of four for a whole week for just £3.50. They’re still edible, but they’re so big that no one has any idea what they are.”Įven more forgiving are the farmers themselves, who are ready to meet the challenges posed by pests (Sherry Dudas, of Honey Brook Organic Farm, in Pennington, New Jersey, said, “It looks like I’ll be eating all our apricots that got hit by plum curculio this year”) and by size (Kaplan-Walbrecht recalled a sweet potato the size of her daughter’s head).Īnd what about produce that’s so eccentric that even a farmer won’t deign to consume it? Items that aren’t used to feed animals or the compost pile go even further down the chain-to that crossroads of lowest possible consumer discernment. And if you let them go even longer they’re curled baseball bats. But if you let them go another week they’re three feet long and curly. If you pick them at the exact, perfect time, they’re two feet long and they curl. Like, we used to grow Armenian cucumbers. Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht, of Garden of Eve Organic Farm and Market, in Riverhead, New York, said, “Our customers buy directly from us, so we have a chance to explain things to them and ask for a little tolerance. Less stringent than wholesalers are retailers, including the farmers’ own farm stands. “They’re not going to be able to deal with peeling a two-legged or twisted carrot.” “Wholesalers always need consistent quality products,” Mike Nolan, of Earth Spring Farm, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, said. It’s marketplace-driven.” Grocery chains and high-end restaurants follow the Department of Agriculture’s specifications, or their own standards, when it comes to size and degrees of spoilage. How do growers decide who gets what? Amy Moreno-Sills, who, with her husband, runs Four Elements Farm, in Puyallup, Washington, said, “As a farmer, I don’t have the luxury of determining what’s ugly or not. But, on the ugliness front, the offerings were community theatre, not Broadway. During three weeks’ worth of Misfits Market deliveries this summer, one customer received many delicious fruits and vegetables, some of them slightly undersized. His outfit sells to Misfits Market’s competitor, Hungry Harvest. “A lot of times with off-grade produce, there’s a scratch or a dent or a puncture, which reduces shelf life dramatically,” Andrew Rose, of New Sprout Organic Farms, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, said. The economics of agriculture make selling misshapen produce an expensive proposition for farmers. The variations are standard: produce that’s too small or too large or that has slight discoloration.” (It is Misfits Market’s Web site that is quoted above.) “The market calls it ugly produce, but ‘ugly’ ends up being only a small portion of it. of Misfits Market, said on the phone the other day. “I would first redefine it as misfit produce,” Abhi Ramesh, the founder and C.E.O. And not a single potato looks like Abe Vigoda. But, when your first shipment of ugly produce arrives and you peer inside the recyclable cardboard box, you do a double take: the produce is not ugly. You did not anticipate this plot point: you’ve decided to pony up twenty-three fifty a week to receive a regular shipment of organic “ugly produce,” perhaps because you’ve read that about half of the produce in the United States goes uneaten, or maybe because you’ve been charmed by a Web site that boasts of “rescuing” foodstuffs such as “onions that are too small, potatoes that are shaped like your favorite celebrity, and carrots that fell in love and got twisted together.” You glow with a sense of mission.
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