Imperfect food — why are we obsessed with perfection?

September 17th, 2012 by everydayminimalist

Found this great graphic done by German artist Uli Westphal who noticed what BF and I have been aware of for a quite a while now — all fruits and veggies are starting to look too perfect.

Same size, shape, and colour.

Tomatoes don’t look twisted and weird, they’re too perfectly round and shiny, and everything else looks too identical for it to be a coincidence!

So Westphal created a photo series of “ugly” fruit and veggies, which I actually find quite beautiful.

The more deformed the tomato or eggplant, the more I want to eat it, because it indicates that it was grown with as little intervention as possible, and therefore is as natural as it can get.

Even in China, they pick fruit that looks like it’ll rot for the best flavour.

“I choose the apples that are pock-marked and are slightly bitten up by bugs,” she told me while replacing the apples in my basket. “I figure if the fruit is good enough for the insect, it’s good enough for me.”

In China, she told me, the most perfectly formed, most appetizing piece of fruit is the scariest of them all.

It bothers me that everything looks so uniform and perfect in the grocery stores. It makes me want to grow my own food even more, to preserve what fruits and veggies USED to taste like, before we started growing monster garlic and perfectly round apples.

I’m getting concerned with all these GMO (genetically modified organisms) fruits & veggies hitting the market and ending up in our bellies.

For me, the biggest mistake staring us in the face is the milk.

In Canada and the U.S., I have never tasted a glass of good, wholesome, tasty milk.

I always stick to soy milk as a result because the “milk” here tastes like WATER. Creamy WATER.

In Europe and even in Asia, the milk was AMAZING. It was tasty and more natural than I had ever had milk in my life.

Why? Because they don’t use hormones on the cows to make them produce more, or feed them crap grass to turn a higher profit.

In Europe, there are stringent laws in place to save our food and preserve its integrity.

In Asia, I am told they just can’t afford the drugs to make their cows produce more milk, hence the better taste.

So whenever I come back to Canada, I switch back to soy milk.

What about you? How do you pick your food?

Do you have concerns? Complaints?

 

 

Posted in Environmental | 4 comments

Previous post:
Next post:

  • TatiLie

    We’ve been buying organic as most as we can. Because we make most our meals from scratch, we still have a low supermarket expense and it pays off in flavour. In my grandparents’ home everything was organic: avocado, guava, ginger, onions from their garden. My grandmother roasted her own coffee. Some vegetables and other fruits would come from my a family friend’s farm (and also butter!), other from the producer’s market and vegetables would grow in their own backgarden and were collect that same morning. Everything was bursting in flavour. I had given up eggs when I moved to Europe. The shell was so thin and the yolk so pale that it seemed coming from a sick hen. Now, I’m back eating eggs if they’re organic. It just not worthy to have the usual stuff. Some fruits like bananas and mangoes I just eat them if I’m back home in Brazil. The ones you find here were taken from the tree way before their prime and they will never taste good. I prefer to eat less but better.

  • JO

    Tasteless GMO food. Regulations to protect consumers are lacking. Monsanto controls everything. Yes, I’m scared, too. Wake up, people!!!

  • Sam

    Mmmh yes, I am with Ellen on that one, those fruits looks like they have grown in the proximity of Tchernobyle…
    And considering what type of other food insects do eat, I wouldn’t trust their taste in fruits!!

  • http://www.defenestratedfeet.com/ Ellen at Defenestrated Feet

    I dunno. I grew up with garden fruits and veggies so I’m quite familiar with the varied, non-perfect appearances of fruit… but for the REALLY weirdly deformed ones I always kind of had the assumption that pesticides and harsh chemicals could contribute to deformities if anything. But I have no professional knowledge on the subject whatsoever.