<b>Geetanjali Krishna:</b> 'Beauty' treatment for 'ugly' food

When I first read about the Ugly Food movement, my first instinct was to pooh-pooh it as something that could happen only in America. "Ugly" foods are those that sellers and buyers often reject because of their appearance - misshapen or mud-caked vegetables and bruised fruits. In America, such unsightly foods end up getting dumped, compounding the problem of food waste. I assumed this problem would never become a big deal in a developing country like India.

However, last week when I was on the Moradabad-Delhi highway not far from Garhmukteshwar, I saw something that made me realise how wrong I was. It all began when I noticed vegetable fields on both sides of the highway. A sucker for fresh-picked produce, I had my eyes peeled for little farmer stands by the road. Then I saw a shed piled high with some orange stuff, which at first glance I thought was marigold. A tube well was pumping water into a tank and half a dozen people were busy washing something in it. As I moved closer, I realised they were scrubbing carrots with soft brushes and rinsing them in the tank. On one side, the washed carrots lay in tall pyramids in the shade, as excess moisture drained off. On the other side lay a sad pile of discards.

Up close, I saw that the discarded carrots were mud-caked, not unusual for a root vegetable. The farmer came to ask me whether I wanted to buy some, and I asked him why he was spending so much time processing his fresh harvest. He laughed and said that was the best way to get a good price for his carrots. "It costs us a fair bit of time and energy to scrub them until all the mud has washed off and they're an inviting shade of orange, but it makes all the difference while selling them," said the farmer. "After all who would want to buy an ugly black carrot when a nice, fresh-looking orange one is available?"

Apparently, this was only the third time the farmer had grown carrots. The first time, he said, he had a good crop but suffered losses as he attempted to sell them au naturel. "When I surveyed the market, I noticed the vegetable vendors, who did the best business, had beautiful displays of vegetables," he recounted. As an experiment last year, he cleaned some of the carrots and discovered that even among vegetables, beauty made all the difference. "When they were clean and a lovely shade of orange, I found I could sell them for double the price I got for the ugly, dirty ones," he said.

Consequently, with his third and present crop he had actually hired labour (two women from his village) to scrub his entire crop clean. "I haven't calculated exactly but I think I must be spending at least Rs 5 per kilo on their beauty treatment," he said. "But their improved saleability makes it worth it." He was now doing the same treatment for beetroots and potatoes as well.

My eyes kept going back to the pile of discards, carrots with unsightly bulges and depressions, mottled with mud. How did they use them, I asked. "We eat some and throw the rest," he said. "But my son tells me that in Delhi supermarkets, pre-cut vegetables sell for even better prices than whole ones… Maybe I'll get these rejects peeled, polished and cut into attractive shapes in my beauty parlour for carrots, and then they'd sell."

The metaphor just became too much to handle at this point, so I mentally apologised to the pile of rejects, bought some pretty orange carrots and left.