Eat Ugly

August 8th, 2017

   Don’t fuss if the harvest coming out of your organic garden doesn’t look like the pristine produce that graces grocery stores.

Compacted soil can lead to double-forked “walking carrots,” while poor pollination is usually behind this “catfacing” of tomatoes.

   Forked carrots, pock-marked potatoes, malformed eggplants that look like they’re delivering a baby, and other flawed fruits and vegetables are usually perfectly fine to eat.

   There’s even some evidence that damaged produce is sweeter and more nutritious than their impeccable brethren.

   So whatever you do, don’t toss your pickings just because they’re a little, well, ugly.

   Unlike at grocery stores – where paying customers expect and demand perfection – home gardeners can be more forgiving and less wasteful.

   The reason most deformed produce becomes ugly is not from some ruinous condition or risky infection. It’s usually related to harmless reactions to growing conditions that cause superficial imperfections.

   Some reasons why your plants might become “cosmetically challenged:”

   * Pollination issues. Female plant parts of fruiters such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, and eggplants need pollen from male parts to “set” fruit.

   Sometimes bees and other pollinating insects do the work. Sometimes it’s by wind and gravity.

   When you get no pollination, you get no fruit. But when partial pollination happens, that’s when you get things like lop-sided apples, warped blackberries, and corn with missing kernels.

   There’s nothing wrong with the malformed results. It just looks uncouth enough to earn a place in the estimated 20 to 30 percent of commercial crops that don’t make it to harvest due to cosmetic failure.

   Besides lack of bees, extreme summer heat is a big reason for poor pollination. When temperatures hit 90 degrees, pollen of many crops suffers (especially tomatoes), causing fruit to stop setting.

   * Weather. Plants don’t appreciate extreme or erratic weather. Heat, lack of rain, wild temperature fluctuations, and frost are some of the stressors that translate into abnormal growth.

   The hollow-heart problem with potatoes (centers are missing) and the blossom-end-rot problem with tomatoes (callousing or rotting on the fruit bottoms) both happen when rain-fueled fast growth follows a growth-stunting dry spell. Consistent water is the cure for both.

   Insults like hail or heavy wind can tear leafy crops (spinach, lettuce, collards, etc.) That doesn’t mean the crops are wasted. Cut away the brown, and salvage the green.

   * Soil nutrition. Sometimes lack of a soil nutrient – often a mineral – can induce ugliness and deformities.

   Run a soil test to check – especially if you’re running into problems with a variety of crops.

Check out this oddity… baby peppers sprouting from seed while still inside a mature pepper.

   * Mutations. Sometimes genetic chance explains weird occurrences. That’s usually what’s behind funny anomalies that get posted online, such as strawberries shaped like little bears (“strawbearies”), peppers growing inside of peppers, Siamese eggplants, bird-shaped gourds, and tomatoes that have grown certain human-like “appendages.”

   Again, these might look weird, but the deformities don’t render the plants non-eat-worthy.

   * Cultural problems. Compacted or rocky soil or planting too closely can lead to deformities in root crops.

   This one is what’s behind carrots and Daikon radishes that put out double or triple forks or that wrap their “legs” voluptuously.

Ugliness is only skin deep in this fungal-spotted apple (left), while gourds often just naturally grow warts like these.

   * Bugs, birds or fungus. Sometimes plant blemish in reaction to a wildlife or disease assault.

   That’s the explanation for scabby apples (fungus), scarred tomatoes (stinkbugs or birds), and carrots with little knobs all over their roots (root-knot nematodes).

   Most of the time, you can just cut away the bad parts and eat the rest. That’s what our foregardeners did with most tree fruits before we came up with the biweekly spray program that gave us immaculate apples.

   If you’re gardening organically, you’re probably more prone to this ugliness explanation.

  By not sentencing ugly produce to the compost bin, you’re not only cutting waste but possible eating healthier.

   Virginia orchardist Eliza Greenman is one grower who decided to test the sugar content of scabbed vs. pristine apples. She found that the damaged ones were 2 to 5 percent sweeter.

   Other scientific studies have shown that stressed and damaged produce often carries higher nutrition profiles, especially when it comes to immune-system-boosting antioxidants.

   That’s not particularly surprising. The same stressors that cause deformity also stunt growth, causing sugar and nutrition to concentrate in smaller packages.

   But it’s also possible that the cosmetic-harming actions also lead to changes in the makeup of the fruits.

   Either way, go ahead and eat ugly.

   If you want to read more on this:

   The Ugly Produce Is Beautiful campaign has a website with styled “ugly” produce arranged in artsy poses, plus recipes and tips on appreciating ugly produce.

   A California food-waste activist named Jordan Figueiredo has an Ugly Fruit and Veg website that encourages use of rejected-for-cosmetic-reasons food.

   At least two companies are trying to get grocery retailers, restaurants, food processors and other food consumers to use imperfect produce: Bon Appetit Management Co.’s Imperfectly Delicious Produce and Imperfect Produce.