Appreciating the Very Imperfect Garden Vegetables

When we shop in the produce section of the grocery store, we find attractive fruits and vegetables. Some leafy greens may have crushed leaves where they were bundled and banded to prevent tearing. But overall, the produce looks pretty good. We expect it to look pretty good. Would you buy a tomato that obviously had a touch of blossom end rot? Or a zucchini that was lopsided, bulging significantly more at one end than the other? Or an apple that had multiple blemishes?

This abundance of beautiful fruits and vegetables, all lined up in rows and layers at the market, is really not like what most folks ate on a daily basis before the 20th century. The introduction of pesticides, improved seeds, and the sorting out of imperfect produce for use in canned products has led us all to believe that everyone's produce should look consistent in size and shape, as well as be on the larger side. 

Before the mid-1800s, most Americans kept kitchen gardens. And if you keep a vegetable garden today, you know that an abundance of perfect produce simply isn't the case. My own garden vegetables look so imperfect that we often joke about who gets to eat more of the garden, us or the combined pests.

In case you've ever felt frustrated by your own garden's problems, I wanted to show you what our beet leaves look like.

Here are some of the leaves that I harvested for tonight. The very worst of the leaves weren't picked, as they were beginning to yellow and some looked a little diseased, common for this late in the season. But I was able to harvest a big bowlful to sauté to go with our meal. This is the third of such harvests. I only have about 10 beets growing in this small autumn patch. I planted a trough planter with beets after I had harvested the earlier vegetables (turnips I think) in early July. So I wasn't expecting a huge beet harvest, but we make the most of what we get.

These leaves have clearly been a meal or two for slugs. I wash the leaves and just ignore the bite holes. I figure that this is just a part of keeping an organic garden. You get chew holes or sometimes have to pick off crawly, slimy critters. But we still get our share of the food.

And this is what I think the garden experience used to be for most folks up until the mid-1900s. By the 1950s, there were several strong and effective pesticides available to home gardeners. No one really knew the hazards of these products at the time, so most consumers had  a positive view of them. It was "progress." We've now come full-circle. Most home gardeners don't want to use a lot of pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides on their produce. Part of the reason I personally keep a kitchen garden is so that I can provide chemical-free fruits and vegetables for my family. And we accept that bugs and slugs will ruin the perfect look that the grocery store displays.

I'm showing you some of our imperfect produce today for a couple of reasons. 1) so if you have a garden and wind up with lots of imperfect fruits and vegetables, at least you know that you're not alone. And 2) when I post my weekly menus and identify what comes from the garden, you don't have a mental picture of a refrigerator full of a blemish-free and perfectly uniform abundance. 

In place of grocery store perfection, I and my family appreciate home-grown flavor over appearance, health benefits of eating fresh and organic, and taking a step towards greater self-sufficiency in procuring some of our food.