Let ugly fruit live

Let ugly fruit live

Chicago Tribune: Today we report a breakthrough of note: The Europeans have overcome their bias against physical imperfection.

They’re warming to ugly fruits and vegetables.

For years, a vast population of odd-shaped fruits and vegetables — crooked carrots, lopsided tomatoes, excessively curved bananas — was snubbed by European Union agriculture bureaucrats. They were deemed unfit for sale in supermarkets by the EU produce police, so they were dumped.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. What a waste. So what if there were a few bumps or a gnarl here and there? Ever heard of a knife?

That kind of shape-centric thinking brought us those bright red, impressively round tomatoes, perfect in every way except they taste like Styrofoam. And jumbo-size strawberries and gargantuan peaches that are bred to please the eye, not the palate.

Sure, they’re beautiful. But that is not the function of fruits and vegetables.

That is why we’re pleased to report that the EU has relented. Imperfect fruit and vegetables once again may be sold in markets.

“It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the ’wrong’ shape,” the European commissioner for agriculture said.

Now that EU bureaucrats have relented (after 20 years), we hope to see more ugliness in American supermarkets. There’s already precedent, in the tasty form of the UglyRipe tomato.

For years, Florida shape-ists argued that the UglyRipe, with its deep ridges and creases, didn’t meet standards for export outside the state. Industry insiders sniffed that it had a “cat face” and looked more like a pumpkin.

But in 2007, the United States Department of Agriculture decreed that flavor rules: UglyRipe could be sold outside Florida.