"Ugly" vegetables? I stick two carrots up at the idea

Neil Kingsnorth

23 September 2013

An apple recently harvested from a tree in my garden that looks a bit like a bum was a source of great joy to my children.  One of the many pleasures of growing food is the wonky harvest that it sometimes provides.  The carrot that looks like a pair of trousers or the potato that looks like my grandad's nose.

So to me, the lines of perfectly straight, perfectly clean, identical and sterile-looking veg we find in too many shops are a sad sight indeed.  The joy of the unexpected is all but banished, replaced by the monotony of the predictable.

That's not to say that wobbly veg doesn't get produced on farms here or abroad.  It does.  Nor is it to say that some of the crops aren't a little damaged in places.  They are. It's just that it often doesn't make it to our plates.  Or even our shops.

According to a recent report, up to a staggering 40% of some crops are rejected.  They are fed to animals or just ploughed back in to the ground because they don't meet the high standards set by retailers for them to conform to rules about size and shape. 

It doesn't even has to be a funny-shaped to be rejected.  Anything slightly too small, slightly too large, just the wrong colour, ever so slightly marked, might be rejected. 

Once we get the food to our homes, a further fifth is apparently wasted because we cook too much or it goes off in the fridge.  We've all done it.  In fact I know there's a mouldy courgette in my fridge right now because I saw it and left it there this morning...

What this all adds up to though is where it starts to get a bit serious.  There's 15 million tonnes of food waste a year in this country according to the report.  Meanwhile, 400,000 people depend on food banks because they can't afford to eat.

Globally, a third of food produced is going to waste; thrown away just as food prices are rocketing. And to produce all of that, there's a huge demand on land and water supplies and in many cases the application of a lot of chemicals.  All for nothing.

The report, Checking out the environment, which Friends of the Earth published in 2005, showed the extent of waste that was occurring through supermarket-enforced standards.  Too little has changed.

I no more want my vegetables to conform and follow the rules than I want my dog to do the opposite.  When it forces food prices up, damages our environment and leaves people empty-mouthed, such vegetable-vanity becomes truly unjustifiable.

So let's actively choose the comedy fruit, let's celebrate blemishes, let's make stews and pies out of left-overs and let's stick a funny shaped carrot up at crop-conformity.

Read our report about food waste and how you can  help.

Neil Kingsnorth - Head of Activism