Digging around in the garden, today, I had to run into the house to look up a stunning fact. Here it is: Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tons, is wasted. But here’s the hitch — The Food and Agricultural Association claims:
- Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.
Fruits and veggies top out the list, not grains, dairy, meat and legumes. It’s the perishables that contribute to (in this country) the over 33 million tons of food each year that ends up in the landfill.
I posit that much of it is ugly veggies, like ours.
This time of year, the veggies in our garden are downright repulsive.
That’s Broccoli Folks! © Liesl Clark
The ceaseless rain and a recent freeze, has waterlogged the cauliflower.
Browned Cauli Still Tastes Great © Liesl Clark
Thanks to a few thousand slugs that share the land with us, the slender kale has holes in it.
Holy Kale © Liesl Clark
The finger potatoes and sun chokes cling to the sodden earth like black clods of nutritious grit.
It’s What’s For Dinner © Liesl Clark
Never fear, friends, just lower your standards, and don’t let your ugly veggies get you down. They’re still food. Hideously delicious food.
Roasted Sun Chokes © Liesl Clark
Gone are the days of showing off our succulent crops in beautiful baskets on long lost sunny afternoons. No, tonight’s dinner was wrestled free from the muck and slime of a New Year’s dark garden of primal growth that only the diehard will eat. We eat the foul-looking foodstuffs because snubbing our nose at them would contribute to the EPA’s wasted food bottom line. No, we’ll whip up dishes from weird days where clouds and wet shadows prevail over the sheepish sunlight.
We triumph, quietly, when the kids eat the ugly veggies.
Pizza with Kale and Red Pepper Flakes © Liesl Clark
So, why be ashamed of the slug holes and dark spots on your rotting heads of cauliflower or snail-slimed leaves of kale when you hear this confession and bear witness to our homely ingredients? Embrace your ugly veggies. They’re food after all.
Washing the Grit From Sun Chokes © Liesl Clark
No one’s watching. No one’s comparing their Instagram-perfect patches of deep solstice greens with yours. Bon appetit! Go ahead, share your vile veggies with the fates that befall all winter gardens. Welcome them into your kitchen, unsightly as they are.
Snail on Kale © Liesl Clark
We eat our ugly veggies with pride. How about you?
Pioneering The Simple Life 
So true! Great post, really! Is this really all food from your garden??? That’s impressive, it must be huge! Lovely photos btw 🙂
Isa
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Thank you so much, Isa! Yes, these are images I shot yesterday in our soggy garden, and what we had for dinner. It’s not so picture-perfect, but I guess that’s the point! I know so many folks who wouldn’t dream of eating our bruised, hole-y, and sad-looking produce. But when it gets cooked up, no one’s the wiser.
— Liesl
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Yeah I agree. That’s the big advantage of your own garden. I have to do shopping and even in bio markets you hardly get “ugly” food, since everyone just wastes it
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I wonder if we started asking for the “ugly” food at farmers markets, for the seconds, if they would leave it out longer? “I want to make vegetable broth, can you give me your ugly veggies?” They’d laugh, but maybe they’d get it and start putting out their not-so-pretty produce at a reduced cost, in a bin, for soup and freezing. I might try it next time!
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I love ugly fruit and veg! I worked in an orange packing shed, once upon a time. It really opened my eyes to how much fruit and veg is wasted because it doesn’t look ‘right’, and which countries have the highest standards for ‘attractive’ food (America, Japan…I’m talking about you. When we packed for America, the amount of fruit that didn’t make the cut made me sick).
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What a great insight. You’re an expert! Thanks so much for sharing your experience. It’s what I suspected. Something has to be done about this waste. So, what happened to the fruit that didn’t make the cut? Was it truly trashed?
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Usually you’d pack Grade 1 (very pretty fruit, sold as brand names or pricey supermarket own brands) and Grade 2 (not-so-pretty fruit, sold as standard supermarket own brands or ‘value ranges’). Next came ‘Juice Grade’ which was, unsurprisingly, sent/sold elsewhere to be made into Juice – fruit that is clearly absolutely fine to consume, but turned into Juice because it doesn’t meet Grade 1 or 2. Then Sour Rot – basically anything that is rotten, split open, carrying any number of fruit borne diseases etc (sent/sold to feed the local moo cows).
So although everything was used, a lot that ended up in Juice Grade could have been sent as whole fruit to be consumed. Some of it would have needed a shorter ‘Consume By’ date because of heavy bruising etc, but some of it just had mottled skin or similar.
When packing for America you’d only have Grade 1, so everything that would usually end up in Grade 2 got sent to juice.
This packing shed was in Australia by the way, and I can only speak for that company, but I imagine it’s very similar elsewhere.
(I have some great photos somewhere of oranges that had grown into all manner of weird shapes by the way – some quite explicit looking!!)
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Fascinating. I really appreciate your input. It’s good to know that most of it was used up, but I guess the point is that we, here in the States, are so used to perfect-looking specimens that we won’t eat anything that looks a little off. And so it goes, right into the bin (or compost.) I’m all about lowering our standards so we can see that fruit and veggies come in all shapes, colors, and sizes (just like we do.)
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It’s similar here in the UK unfortunately. I’ve seen some small supermarkets in the rest of Europe (France springs to mind) have trialled selling ‘ugly fruit and veg’ and it worked really well – I should read up on it and see if it’s still going well!
Looking forward to keeping up with your blog.
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Yes it is, even here in Germany we have companies like https://etepetete-bio.de/
Esther
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That’s great Esther, thank you for sharing. Great ideas that could be implemented everywhere.
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That would be perfect! 😉
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Thanks for the link, Esther!
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any time 😉
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You make a great point – and I love your pictures!
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Thanks a million, Susan!
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Hi Lisa,
I just came home form a “food saving” initiative. http://www.foodsharing.de
Sharing instead of throwing in a bin.
Pity we don’t have a garden, but I would love to grow my own hideous looking veggies, like we did when I was a kid. Thanks! Esther
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Hi Esther: The foodsharing organization looks really interesting. I love their user interface on the web. Do you know if they wrote their app themselves or if they’re using some sort of freeware?
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I don’t know for sure. But everything works without money. Only voluntary work, even the website and hosting. You can get in touch with them: info@foodsharing.de
Raphael Fellmer is the one behind all this: http://www.raphaelfellmer.de/ Here you find also some informations in English. Have a lovely day!
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