Make vegetables great again!

Sure, there are 70 million fellow citizens who are in mourning.  I don't care.  

We have taken our country back from the sociopath and his followers.  I am ready to move on to pontificating about stuff like I usually do, even when I have no idea what I am talking about.

When I was a kid, cauliflower was rare.  I hadn't even heard of something called broccoli.  Chances are that if I had been asked what broccoli is, even into my teens I would have said it was perhaps a type of bacterium--like E. Coli.

After coming to America, it has been an introduction to a world of vegetables and fruits that I didn't know even existed.  Patty pan squash?  Come on!

Or strawberries and raspberries.  I had read about them, but didn't taste one until I came to California.  The first blackberries that I had were after I moved to Oregon.

Years ago, a neighbor gave me a small packet of quinoa and said that I might like to cook and eat it.  I had never heard of quinoa until then, and I certainly didn't know how to pronounce it either.

My point here is this: In five decades, the varieties of fruits and vegetables that I consume has increased phenomenally.  There is more that I don't know about. 

Extrapolate from all these, and I could hypothesize that there are way more known-unknowns that we need to make a lot more people aware of.  Especially because of climate change:

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt.

Diversity is the key to our healthy future:

Solving the food-and-climate crisis will require going back to basics, finding ways to make our mix of crops broader rather than even narrower. ... We can do that again, adding overlooked crops to the mainstream food supply and working to broaden the agricultural gene pool after centuries of going the other way. That adjustment will help ensure that farmers will have crops suitable for the extreme growing conditions they are likely to encounter in the coming decades.

“We haven’t done a very good job of maximizing diversity,” Lippman says. “And diversity is what you need to win the battle of climate change.”

Like with orphan crops:

ones that are cultivated on a small scale in some parts of the world, but that have not benefited from breeding and research to the same extent that major crops have. Some of them are already suited to relatively hot or dry conditions. Because they have not gone through the same extensive breeding as corn, soy, and wheat, the orphans have more untapped potential.

Quinoa is an example of an orphan crop.  Though it was consumed for centuries in the Andes, the rest of us had no idea about it.  I knew about it barely a decade ago.  Once when visiting with a way-out-there in the extended family cousin, I was pleasantly surprised that the cousin's mother was making a quinoa uppuma.  Adapting a new grain or vegetable is not a big deal--coming to know about is the hurdle. 

Lippman’s research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has been investigating orphans in the Solanaceae family, a diverse group that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. At least 25 orphan crops exist in this family, and there are many other uncultivated wild relatives that have crop potential. Lippman is particularly interested in the domesticated African eggplant, grown for its fruit, and a wild relative, Solanum anguivi, whose leaves are eaten. Only local communities eat these species, because there hasn’t been much interest in developing them into mainstream food crops. “There are dozens of Solanaceae plants that have more widespread agricultural potential than we currently realize,” Lippman says.

The next time somebody tells you that we cannot feed more humans, ask them to explain their logic.  And then talk to them about the orphan plants.  Help them understand that not everybody on this planet eats the same stuff, and that all of us could benefit from a lot more diversified portfolio.  "We missed the chance to stop climate change, but Lippman believes we can still win the race to remake agriculture and safeguard the food supply for humankind."

We humans are ugly and imperfect. So, we take it out on fruits and veggies?

I was no different from the kids I knew--we didn't want bananas with blemishes on them.  We wanted only the perfect looking ones.  The elders tried convincing us that the ones with dark spots were really the tastier ones, but we said "no, thanks." Well, we never said "no, thanks" because the old culture did not have a place for "thanks" in everyday conversation.

Banana with blemishes. 

Cauliflower with worms. 

Carrots that were bent. (Thankfully, that led to the baby carrots!)

A never ending list, it now seems like.

As if the "fair skin" weren't enough of a discriminatory practice, we were highly superficial in judging even vegetables and fruits simply based on how they looked!

Yes, a real tomato. Misshapen. Not perfect. But, a tomato. Source

Now, with more fruits and vegetables than we can ever possibly eat, we consumers are even worse--we demand nothing but perfection in the fruits and vegetables that we purchase.  But, it doesn't take even half a brain to figure out that nature always does not turn out perfections.  I am a living proof of that ;)

So, whatever happens to the imperfect produce?

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that high cosmetic standards in the retail industry exclude 20 to 40 percent of fresh produce from the market. Sometimes farmers can sell those unwanteds to processors making jam or cider or pickles, but as those systems rely increasingly on mechanization, they become less flexible when it comes to shape and size. Tons of food — 800 to 900 million tons globally each year, the weight of 9,000 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers — rot in storage or don’t make it out of the fields because farmers can’t find a market.

Aha, you didn't think about this, eh!

Cucumbers should be straight, cauliflower florets should be tightly held, and rhubarb stalks should be ruby red. If not, retailers tell farmers, consumers won’t buy them.

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a couple of cucumbers harvested from her own garden. They were misshapen. I would never have bought that kind of cuke at the store.  But, because it was from my friend's garden, and it was a friendly gift, I ate those cukes.  Boy they were tasty!

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global food wastage, about half of which occurs during production and post-harvest handling and storage, was responsible for 3.6 billion tons of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available; that’s more CO2 than Brazil, Japan and Australia together emitted in 2011. Wasted food also takes 250 cubic kilometers of water to produce every year, which is 38 times the amount used by all households in the United States combined.

By now, are you also feeling guilty like I am?  No?  Ok, there's more then:

By insisting on perfect-looking produce, customers also cheat themselves of taste and variety. Apple breeders used to select specifically for russetting because it was associated with longer shelf life. That’s how we got Hudson’s Golden Gem, a delicious variety that’s a favorite among my farmer friends. But you’ll never find a Gem in a standard grocery store today, precisely because of that russetting. We’ve decided that apples should be shiny, not rough; large, not small; and red or green, but definitely not brown; so now what we find in stores are piles of uniform Red Delicious apples with latex-like skin, mealy flesh and no complexity of flavor. Customers are missing out on the pleasures of a russetted apple: the coarse texture against the tongue and the concentrated flavor of the dense flesh that accompanies it.

Are you thinking what I am thinking?  What the heck is a russetted apple, right?  Hey, I can't tell you everything--do some work on your own, at least some time! ;)

If only we can learn from the French, who have made a fashion campaign out of this issue:

Source

What is the deal?

One French grocer, Intermarché, began buying “ugly” produce in 2014 and selling it at slightly reduced prices at several locations; the success prompted the company to expand the initiative to all of its stores.

That's the deal, dear reader: charge more for the "perfect" ones and less for the "imperfect" ones.  The market system works, even if we cannot access the inner morals!

Now, you know what to do the next time you are in the grocery store.  Yep, search for the imperfections--you won't find them because they never even make it to the store!

Vegetables are like porn because ... "We know ‘em when we see ’em"

At the risk of sounding like a maniacal libertarian that I am not (only a maniac, thank you very much!) the recent tomato/vegetable controversy is a reminder that when government takes it upon itself to define something for all of us, then somebody who stands to gain from it will work to maximize their own self-interest.

First this update:

the House voted 298-121 that a slice of pizza spread with two tablespoons of tomato paste should be counted as a vegetable, at least when it’s fed to schoolchildren. Obama signed the bill into law on Friday.

One might question the wisdom of our reps at Congress worrying about tomato paste when they can't seem to figure out anything about the budget.

But, why this tomato paste bill you ask?

“It was Schwan and ConAgra that were lobbying the issue,” says Margo Wootan, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “If two tablespoons of tomato paste counts as a vegetable, pizza is a reimbursable meal. Because the crust counts as a grain, the sauce is the vegetable, and the cheese and pepperoni have protein. But two tablespoons of tomato paste isn’t a vegetable.”

You can't blame the food industry--they do what they have to do.  It is a logical consequence to government having taken up the responsibility to define a food pyramid and what our school kids can eat.

BTW, what is a vegetable anyway?

Suddenly all vegetables, not just the zucchini, are pornographic: We know ‘em when we see ’em. I asked a spokesperson for the Food and Nutrition Service, the USDA body that oversees the school-lunch program, how they defined a vegetable. “When it comes to defining foods, we hew to the FDA’s standards.” But Janet McDonald, an FDA spokeswoman, told me that such fundamentals were out of FDA purview: “We don’t have a definition of vegetables. Probably it’s under the USDA.”

Hahaha!