Ugly Food

 

We Americans are preoccupied with eating "pretty" food. We need our apples perfectly round and shiny. Potatoes oblong with just the right amount of moisture content for baking.

Yet there are many perfectly nutritious fruits and veggies that are irregular, misshapen.  Take potatoes, for example. When grown from seed, rather than tuber, they turn out kind of like this:

Not pretty, but perfectly edible and nutritious. I am reminded of a newspaper article I wrote more than 40 years ago about Stanley Peloquin, a UW botanist who developed a way to grow potatoes from true seed. He was trying to develop a way to feed the hungry of the third world. Potatoes, paired with milk, make a complete protein. Dried milk could be shipped to the third world without spoilage to be reconstituted with water. The problem is that water in the third world is often contaminated. Thus, Peloquin's efforts to solve world hunger went largely unfulfilled. Still throughout his 37 career at the University of Wisconsin, he won many awards and accolades.