Avoiding “ugly” fruits and vegetables can be all in your head.
Produce section managers in US food stores know about merchandising and just how much presentation affects buyers’ perception– and therefore the store’s fruit and vegetable sales.
Stroll through a supermarket’s produce section and you’re likely to find rows of perfectly formed and unblemished fruits and veggies that call your name. Gets the endorphins to stirring.
And American consumers have grown to expect exactly such perfection. How on earth did this happen?
How Marketers Live Rent-free Inside Our Heads
The American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing gave an astonishing reason why people won’t buy misshapen or blemished fruit and vegetables: “…Buying unattractive produce negatively impacts consumers’ view of themselves, causing a drop in self-perceptions.”
The authors also say that grocers typically have to discount the misshapen or blemished fruit at 35% – 45%. So if you’re buying their perfect version you’re paying up to 45% too much.
(Note: If you’re a psychology/research nerd this article will fulfill all your intellectual needs for at least six months.)
Here’s another article from a food packaging industry group citing Nielsen research on how Americans feel about buying “ugly” fruit.
But wait: do the “ugly” fruits and veggies taste OK, and are they even safe for me to eat?
Damn Skippy, and I have a perfect example, right from my own apple trees on our North Carolina homestead.
How ‘Bout Them Apples
Some great examples of how blemished produce can be an emotional turn-off, yet be perfectly nutritious and OK to eat, are my own Grimes Golden apples on our homestead.
This season’s apples were the first yield from a sapling I got from our local Ag Extension office, and which I planted five years ago. The Grimes Golden is an heirloom variety that is thought to have produced the Golden Delicious variety we all know about. They mature and start falling in early September here in western North Carolina at 3,000 feet altitude.
I’ve never sprayed them with any pesticides, and the only fertilizer I’ve ever used was Jobe’s organic fertilizer spikes for fruit trees for the first two years. I also chopped and dropped comfrey around the tree’s base. The “soil” here is full of red clay.
I always knew if I didn’t spray pesticides I would probably end up with blemishes. I didn’t know what kind, and I wondered what kind of yield I’d get. It turns out that Grimes Golden apples are susceptible to sooty blotch and flyspeck.
As you can see from the before and after photos below, although the growth was prolific, I ended up with both sooty blotch and flyspeck fungi.
I found out too late that a primary cause of sooty blotch and flyspeck is inadequate air circulation during wet and humid months in the crown of the tree. Some judicious pruning is recommended. And if you have a wooded area close by with dense underbrush (that’s us!), then your apples will likely get infected from the windborne fungus spores.
However gross the apples appear, it’s safe to eat the fruit with sooty blotch and flyspeck.
This first year’s harvest was a celebration! The tree was so prolific we had to support several limbs that were bending over due to the weight of all the apples.
We’ve eaten them raw, peeled and in applesauce. And if you’ve never had the old country dish of fried apples on biscuits, well, son…
I raise all my fruits and vegetables on our homestead using organic practices (what small grower like me in her right mind would jump through the hoops necessary to be certified as organic?). So sometimes I get ugly produce. But we live like royalty from my garden and I sell some of the produce that’s least affected at local farmers markets and CSAs. Savvy customers are willing to accept blemished and misshapen fruits and veggies when they know where it comes from and how it’s grown. That’s why locally grown produce is a sought-after commodity in our area.
