Hello everyone welcome back to the show it's Kevin from epic gardening and today we are talking

about weird misshapen fruit and vegetable and if it makes sense to eat and I think as an organic gardener or someone who practices, I would say beyond organic

practices in the garden, certainly when it comes to the certification, I have an affinity for all sorts of weird types of fruit or misshapen or interestingly

shaped, basically anything that is not absolutely perfect from the eyes of the average consumer or a supermarket.

So what's interesting about supermarkets is they will only purchase and sell number

one grade produce, which means produce that is perfect in the eyes of the

stores buyers aka you and I if we were to go to a grocery store now hopefully as

gardeners we understand that that is a misleading way to present

a fruit because many different things grow based on different growing conditions or certain growing practices, they will not come out the same way.

So consumers really expect, unfortunately, to find these perfect,

unblemished arrow-strait carrots,

perfectly round tomatoes, no bruising at all.

But if you ever have grown anything of your own,

which I hope all of us listening to this podcast

have grown stuff of our own in our garden, we know that it doesn't really

come out that way all the time. So I would say that almost everything I've ever

grown has some miniature flaw, quote unquote, in it and I'm using that very loosely because I

personally do not view it as a flaw. Now what happens to stuff that supermarkets say

no to the grade two or below produce. What happens is it ends up in a

landfill or some sort of commercial composting system. It's absolutely crazy

almost one-third of edible and available food in the United States

is wasted by both retailers, supermarkets, and consumers, you and I, right? All of us in America. So that comes to a staggering 133 billion pounds of produce that goes into landfills. And you might say, oh, it goes into a landfill, it's going to

...