Ugly Food: Why Beautiful Produce is Not Sustainable

It's the season to appreciate inner beauty. It can be ugly outside in the winter time, so we sit by the (sustainable) fireplace and enjoy our local food. That's sustainable, right? Well, have you looked at your food lately? Is it pretty? No, really: this is important.

Ugly food gets overlooked in the chain from farm to supermarket. The two-legged carrots, the lumpy parsnips, the odd-colored turnip: they are all misfits in their respective fields, and they all get culled. When the produce gets to the supermarket shelf, it's culled by grocery departments and by consumers as well. That apple with the blotch? No one wants it. It gets to sit on the shelf and in the USA, farmers end up disposing more than a fifth of their crops every year simply because these crops are not uniform enough to pass muster. Until 2008, EU regulations meant that 26 different kinds of fruits and vegetables could not be sold if they are not large enough or uniform enough to make it in the market. Thankfully, this was overturned and by 2009, small or ugly fruits and vegetables once again graced supermarket shelves. Interestingly enough, Sainsbury's was a force behind the campaign to love ugly food, saying that adding this food into the grocery store reduced prices and made food more affordable for everyone. Twenty percent. What would you do if you lost that much income? That much food from your pantry? If the food is good, it's a waste and shame to lose it. We all need that food.

What can you do? Shop locally and get produce from farmers. Tell your farmers that it doesn't matter whether the food is ugly. You'll still love it and eat it. And if it's a potato, a yam a turnip or any one of a countless list of foods, it will be processed anyway, processed into something delicious and beautiful.

To encourage sustainable food use, we need to find more alternative markets for the ugly food of the world as well. Support small producers of secondary products like dried apples, vegetable soups, sauces, and jams. This is the perfect place for the ugly vegetables: in a soup, no one will notice you're not perfect, just that you're delicious.

And advocate for those ugly ducklings of the food world. Sustainable food? Give us more of it! It's ridiculous for government agencies to tell carrots how they need to look, especially when this results in massive crop waste. In a country where people go hungry and have limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables, we should be using all of our edible produce, not just the produce that looks good. Uniformity in food? That's so last century.

Photo Credit: Flickr