by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

​An heirloom plant, heirloom variety, or heirloom vegetable, sometimes called a heritage plant, is an old cultivar (some say it has to at least 50 years old) that is "still maintained by gardeners and farmers particularly in isolated or ethnic communities".  They may have been commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but are not typically used in modern large-scale agriculture. 

The reason is that heirloom varieties tend not to be used in large scale agriculture is that they are variable and unpredictable. Although most heirlooms have superior flavor because they are open-pollinated (meaning they rely on natural pollination from insects, birds, animals, or the wind), their shape, size, and color results, and yield are more variable within a species. Our food culture is built on beauty standards and sameness, rather than on taste and variability. ​Agribusiness relies upon predictable produce yield per acre, and produce that can be shipped long distances for greater sales (ie: heirloom tomatoes have thinner skins and bruise easily), tend not uniform in size or shape (less likely to fit neatly into pre made containers), or have a surprising variety of color (unexpected presentation for consumers). These factors make most heirloom varieties perfect for farmers' markets and local produce stands, but not perfect for sale in today's multi-chain multistate and international supermarkets and grocery stores. 

When a produce comes from a plant that has been cultivated to have specific DNA for specific qualities - size, color, shape -  it has to be replicated from new seeds purchased from a seed company every year or from new plants or clones. This starts to limit plant biodiversity and sets up scenarios for species endangerment. Read about Seedless Watermelon.

On the other hand, heirloom varieties continue over time when growers save the seeds of from their best plants to be replanted every year. With their unique shapes, sizes, and colors, heirloom plants often look different from the bulk of the perfect fruits and vegetables we are used to buying at the supermarkets and grocery stores. Besides, if you have ever tried a local heirloom tomato, no wonder they have become so popular - their flavor, not to mention colors and shapes - are superior and enliven any meal!

Try making our Heirloom Tomato Tart, Heirloom Tomato, Watermelon and Prosciutto Salad, Grilled Vegetable Flatbread and more on my website, www.CraftyBaking.com 

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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

​Two types of food that contain trace levels of highly hazardous pesticides are leafy greens - kale and collard greens - and hot peppers. They were frequently found to be contaminated with insecticides toxic to the human nervous system. The Environmental Working Group (EWG.org) recommends that you buy organic instead. Source.

Did you know that less than one percent of our farmland is dedicated to growing organic crops. If we invested more in organic farming, we’d not only protect the environment, but we’d make organic food more affordable and accessible for everyone – meaning more clean, healthy food for our families, grown right here in the United States. Help by signing an important petition!

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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

​Instagrammer Jane Collins from www.janecollins.com.au and www.sizzleandswirl.com was gifted an abundance of garden tomatoes from her friend. She didn't want to waste any of her bounty, since fresh tomatoes keep only a day or two.

Jane decided to preserve some by drying them using our Sundried Tomatoes Recipe and extending their shelf life to a month or more. An option in our recipe, after drying, is to further flavor them - she added olive oil, and she further flavored them with garlic, thyme, cracked pepper, and sea salt. 

The result she reports: "they taste amazing!"

They also look amazing! We posted this on our @UglyProduceIsBeautiful Instagram account!

​Food styling and photo by Jane Collins.
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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

​Did you know that we consumers account for the largest share of food waste in America? The average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia,12 up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s. American families throw out approximately 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy.  In terms of total mass, fresh fruits and vegetables account for the largest losses, followed closely by dairy, and meat/poultry/fish.

We recommend, along with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that we Americans can help reduce waste by learning when food goes bad, buying imperfect produce, and storing and cooking food with an eye to reducing waste. (NRDC.org)  

Other recommendations we have at Ugly Produce is Beautiful are to:
1. Properly store food. I have developed food storage charts for you to refer to; 
2. Learn how to cook and bake with ugly produce or produce that is on its last-legs or over-ripe rather than throwing it away. I have ample recipes for you to use;
3. Rotate food in your fridge and cupboards. I like to rotate food in my fridge at least every other day, and in my cabinets about once a week or month. It always amazes me what perfectly good food I find that I have forgotten about;
4. Shop from a list and only buy what you need from the grocery store;
5. Serve food from small plates or do not overfill regular sized dinner plates. Food waste typically occurs from serving too much food, which tends to goes to waste;
6. Learn to repurpose left-overs or use what you have saved from previous meals stored in the fridge or freezer;
7. Avoid sales with perishable goods unless you know that you're going to consume them right away;
8. Don't wash fruits and vegetables in advance of storage because they spoil more rapidly;
9. Educate yourself about the usable and nutritional parts of fruits and vegetables that can be eaten rather than thrown away;
​10.  Don't grocery shop when you're hungry, as we tend to impulse buy or buy a lot more.

Do you have any food saving or food waste prevention tips that you can add here? We'd love to hear them!

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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

​We are please to announce the first New York City Ugly Produce Summer CSA - called OUR FARMER SHARE. It's a partnership between Ugly Produce is Beautiful and Local Roots NYC. It's our joint Food Waste project. There will be ugly produce educational information and recipes provided at all CSA locations.

FARMER SHARE
Cost For Remaining Summer Season: $30 Cost Per Week: $6 Distributed: Weekly Start Date: Week of July 26 Orders Due: July 21st at 11:59pm

Every year in the United States, six billion pounds of perfectly good fruits and vegetables go largely unharvested or unsold, for aesthetic reasons. These outcasts are being called “ugly produce” or “imperfect produce” by the media – or produce that is misshapen or bruised, sometimes with a bit of scarring; it’s produce that’s still wonderful to eat and is not spoiled.

Much of ugly produce in the US is thrown away and our Local Roots farmers compost it or feed it to their animals because it is rejected by our market system which prefers “perfect produce”; this is a huge part of our growing food waste system. Every pound grown represents a sizable investment of energy, water, land, natural and human resources. Let’s not waste it. One of the simplest things you can do to help the planet is to buy and eat “ugly produce”.

Local Roots NYC has partnered up with Ugly Produce is Beautiful to bring you our FARMER SHARE: 3lbs of produce each week that are slightly scarred or bruised but still beautiful despite what traditional markets tell us and still perfect to cook with. You’ll receive 2-3 varieties of vegetables selected by our lovely farmers at a price that’s under retail value. With our Farmer Share, you’ll get extra items to cook with while our farmers can get more out of their bounty.

Our new Farmer Share is an add-on to our Vegetable Share. You must have a vegetable share or place an order for one – new orders will have the weeks they miss refunded. To avoid the late fee, use code “allproduceisbeautiful” at checkout.

Help eliminate food waste and grow your vegetable bounty.

​by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

When I was growing up in Southern California over 50 years ago, we called these navel oranges, and they looked just like the ones in the photo - a bit bruised, with surface flaws.

We picked them from our backyard trees and bought them from roadside trucks. I remember the numerous navel orange groves (now long gone) in Orange County, CA, hence its name. They we so juicy and fragrant.

I was happy to see these on my recent trip to the California farmers' market, while on vacation from the East Coast where I now live, and to be able to eat my favorite "old friends" again. They were actually labelled Heirloom Navel Oranges. I had to take a double-take when I read the sign. I knew immediately that the ones I buy today must have been "improved upon" in my lifetime for these to be called heirlooms. I now know that for something to be called an heirloom variety, that it is original, old, and unique; that the common varieties we see at the marketplace today, have been bred over my lifetime in order to produce more uniform fruit, more productively, and faster without considering flavor, which is the normal agribusiness industry practice today. 

The heirloom navel is the original or “old line” Washington Navel that got the California’s citrus industry booming. Heirloom navels are grown using certain farming practices. The grower gives special attention to the soil, just like it was done since navels were introduced to America from Brazil in the 1800s. It reportedly isn't common practice anymore for navels that are sold in the grocery stores, and hence, the original great flavor has been lost.

Unlike the navel you are used to, heirlooms aren’t in stores year around. They typically will find them in stores from December into late April/early May with the peak being in the winter months. A couple of growers you can still purchase them from are Ripe to You and Cecelia Packing.

There was nothing like my eating these now called navel orange heirloom varieties, again! ​It brought tears to my eyes and pure joy to my senses, when I bit into my precious prize. Juice was dripping down my arms as I ate it, and I found orange remnants of peel under my fingernails from having to struggle with peeling it. The flavor was outstanding.

I was having a real old-fashioned heirloom produce experience; something that my children and their children may never experience. What is natural fruit to me is not the same authentic experience that they hold in their memories. They get the repeated messages that perfect and abundant, year-round and always available food is more important than flavor. How sad. There's nothing special for them (and us) to look forward to because produce has become seasonless.

As children, my mother always put a navel orange in our stocking at Christmas. I never understood why she did that. Now I finally do.

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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

Have you ever noticed all of the seedless watermelon for sale in the supermarkets and grocery stores? What happened to their seeds?

Science and agribusiness happened.

Big business claims that consumers asked for their seeds to be eliminated. But no one ever asked me about this. Did they ask you?

I never thought that seeds in watermelons were such a big issue in life. Who decided to take them out, spend millions of dollars on developing a seedless variety, and then spend millions on convincing us about the benefits of having fruit without seeds? The advertising pitch I've read is that seedless varieties easier to eat and more convenient to prepare.

​But I never complained to anyone. Did you?
​
Along with watermelons, now, common varieties of seedless fruits include tomatoes, grapes, and bananas. Additionally, there are numerous seedless citrus fruits, such as oranges, lemons, and limes. They have been developed because the media says that the demand is there from consumers.

I never demanded this? Have you?

The danger in creating seedless fruit is that we have to rely upon hybridized and trademarked plants for our food, rather than seeds from nature. This places nature and our natural food sources in the hands of big business and science, and eliminates biodiversity. We become reliant upon an unnatural system to be able to feed ourselves. Plant cloning in science labs is what can produce more plants, no longer done with seeds in nature. We have to then buy nature, rather than simply using it to grow food.

This type of food system has also proven to be dangerous. If a plant variety gets an incurable disease, such as what is happening to the Cavendish banana, there isn't new plant DNA readily available to start a new viable banana crop because the seeds are gone. The Cavendish, our popular eating banana, may go extinct in 5 to 10 years. Scientists are scrambling to develop a new eating banana variety that can withstand being shipped long distances to markets around the world that the public will accept. It takes years and sometimes decades to develop such a plant, if they can at all.

Are creating seedless varieties worth all this for the future of our natural planet? No one ever asked me whether or not I minded having seeds in my fruit. Besides, the term "seedless fruit" is biologically somewhat contradictory, since fruits are usually defined botanically as mature ovaries containing seeds.  

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by Sarah Phillips, CEO and founder, Ugly Produce is Beautiful

One of the simplest things you can do to help our planet is to buy and use ugly produce. Every pound grown represents a sizable investment of energy, water, natural, and human resources. Let's not waste it.

One of the many important steps we at Ugly Produce is Beautiful are doing this summer to combat ugly produce food waste is to partner with Local Roots NYC to offer what we call our OUR FARMER SHARE: CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farmer Share for sale in New York City at all of the Local Roots NYC locations. Information about ugly produce, plus recipes, will be posted at all locations.

​This important CSA Farmer Share Ugly Produce program will commence in mid-July, and we will make an announcement.

​Much of ugly produce is thrown away because it is rejected by our market system that chooses perfect produce for sale. Ugly produce is a huge part of our growing food waste system: 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten which is the equivalent of $165 billion dollars.

A great part of this uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions. Methane is a gas that has 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Methane absorbs the heat of the sun, further warming the atmosphere.

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