Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
This is just how insane modern life can be....
federica
Seeker of the clear blue sky...Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt Moderator
Asda supermarkets are offering a 30% discount on a range of vegetables.
Purely and simply because they're funny-shaped. Not going off, not spoiled, not 'seconds', not 'best before' not 'use by'. They just look odd.
It seems in our consumerist mindset, we cannot consider purchasing anything "natural" unless it is also "perfect".
The whole world's gone infekkin'sane....
Really...??
I mean - REALLY - !!?!
4
Comments
Calm down @federica.
We have stranger insane vegetables to deal with (me for example).
Most organic vegetables look like this, so I feel we might see a gradual introduction to tastier, safer, more nutritious, sustainable, ethical farming entering mainstream from farmers markets and specialist retailers.
Eat wonky!
I do hope none of them look rude....or maybe they'd charge more for those?!
Every little helps.
The way I see it, the sellers of vegetables have long ago chosen to not offer their wonky fare to the main marketplace. A few weeks or months ago, I signed a petition to promote the selling of wonky veggies to counter food waste and tweeted it. I see it as a very good thing. So...let's hear it for those risqué veggies!
Up to %40 of good food is thrown away
@federica
The world has not gone insane, it's always** been** insane.
It's inhabitants arrive insane, bound to the delusion that each of us is fundamentally separate from each other & the rest of existence.
Somewhere along the line, with phenomenal effort, we might see through our conditioned ignorance just long enough to start addressing some of our own lack of sanity.....
Everything else, veggy marketing included, is just veggi gravy.
Look at the bright side. A lot of stores won't carry veggies like that. So by offering them at a discount, your store is providing a market for them, which means they won't get thrown out, or turned into some kind of paste or chopped up for canned soup. And by offering them at a significant discount, they're providing more affordable veggies for those on a tight budget.
But yes, consumerism can be silly and too perfectionistic.
I like the balance of a marketing plan that encourages folks to see the potential worth of a product that is unique over those who's appraisals depend solely on some sense of external conformity.
Thinking about it a bit, if any of us were shopping for some veggies and among our choices were a selection of both well shaped and misshapen I would guess most of us would take the good looking ones. Its not so much that we wouldn't take an odd duck if that's all there were. That being the case this seems like a good solution to sell those ghastly freaks of nature.
We are all human and being human we have flaws (just like the vegetables, so it would seem )
All this wonkiness toward perfectly good food when, due to distribution imbalances, (polite way of putting it), we have millions of people starving to death. (Not including the war victims).
Yes the world we live in is strange, but it is the world we have.
The change is up to us.
Peace to all
At least they are selling them. I see this as a vast improvement. Most of the time, they are simply thrown away. Not even offered as food for farm animals or anything. Just thrown in the trash. A large amount of produced food in the western world meets this fate. This is why many people suggest that we actually CAN afford to feed everyone on the planet.
If they put odd looking, but perfectly safe and yummy food next to "perfect" looking food, people will almost always choose the more perfect looking food. It is just our nature to assume something that looks ideal, IS ideal. Our attraction to things plays a big part in our lives.
Anyhow, I wish they did this here. I think it's great.
This reminds me of a friend who use to come to the Buddhist group, she wanted to help the help a community organisation that helps those in need. She had grown a weird & wacky shaped carrot which she auctioned off on Facebook a couple of years back, I can't remember how much she got for it, but it helped the community group....
All this talk of food has got my stomach rumbling
These are the safe vegetables, it turns out freaky vegetables can get quite "freaky"
These are from my garden. The 2 on the bottom left look like a nice couple, LOL.
Am I the only one that chooses the odd looking vegetables at the market on purpose?
No, they are normally my first choice too
Has anyone noticed that heirloom tomatoes are suddenly popular? They're the most crazy-looking mis-shapen veggies I've ever seen, plus they have odd colorations: purple, and green combined with red. But they're sold by specialty grocers. I think they have more vitamins than the usual kind, though I haven't looked it up. But most heirloom vegetable varieties are much higher in nutrients than the more "domesticated" types. Like purple carrots. Off the charts for nutrients.
Carrots were originally purple, yellow and white,
then in the 17th century an orange version was bred and people planted it instead of the others to honor William of Orange.
I also read that the orange ones were bred to be sweeter, while the purple ones tended to be a little more bitter. Similarly, with sweet corn. But breeding things to be sweeter isn't necessarily healthier.
I tried out the heirloom tomatoes and they are expensive, but the green ones taste best to me. I imagine they are grown non-gmo and low pesticides so that's a plus!
An English gentleman of course, despite being a Protestant.
Federica, did you buy some?
I buy it ll the time, even before it was decided to market it as a quirky "hey here's an idea!" commodity....
We grow a lot of heirloom veggies, but their nutritional content usually depends on the soil they grew in and how well it was fertilized, and with what. They are generally more nutritious than standard if only because most growers of herilooms are organic growers. Many of my heirlooms have been from plants my great grandma brought from Finland. My grandma grew them at their farm and brought them to her garden next door to us, and that is how we started our garden. Many decades of seeds, which is kind of fun!
I much prefer them in so many ways, including that they are just a nice size. The ridiculous nature of our genetically modified foods is just disturbing to me. Giant sized early tomatoes, carrots are thick as my wrist. Ick. They just don't appeal to me.
Foods come to ripen at their ideal times for a reason. Because eating with the cycles of the foods works quite well. There is a reason we crave particular foods at different times of year. Most of us won't crave chili or stew in July. But we most often don't crave cold crisp salads and iced tea in January, either. There's good reason for that.
I crave chocolate.
But I think you're right, and part of living in our modern society is learning to disassociate ourselves from the natural world. Who needs nature when we have Monsanto?
And it's also not at all surprising to me that Federica's store can't sell stuff that looks different, unless they discount the price. Numerous studies have shown that attractive people get better promotions and raises. So if attractive people can command a premium in the job market, it makes sense that attractive vegetables can command a premium in the food market. Have you noticed that sunglass display kiosks generally have a mirror? As the saying goes, "It's not how you see, it's how you look." The simple truth is they sell more sunglasses if they put a mirror there than they do without it.
If goofy looking veggies are being promoted nowadays, maybe goofy looking humans will come back in vogue, too.
So far, my goofy looks don't appear to have made it to the Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely level, but I'm still hoping....
You are normal
Tee Hee.
In the inner path/Middle Way, it is how you perceive not what is scene [sic]
Vegetables in sunglasses. @federica is right we live in 'mad world'.
Thank goodness I am a normal wonky.
Crazy as it sounds, many people prefer to buy artifitially coloured or shaped vegetables and meat rather than choose the plainer organic counterpart simply because they look nicer to the eye.
Many men have for decades chosen silicon-inflated unineuronal bimbos over intelligent, self-possessed women, so why should that come about as such a surprise?
I saw a special about orange juice not long ago. They claim that they don't add any water, sugar or artificial flavoring but they do add natural flavoring. More than would be naturally present.
For them to have no additives, they have to heat the juice up until packaging. That takes away all the good orangy flavor we love.
So they add it back in and whoever adds the most back in is seen to have the best oranges.
This was told to many consumers and most of them said they didn't care and would still buy the most popular brand if they are adding the most flavor back in.
I had a big rant about artificial colours and flavors but I don't have time at the mo.
All this "strangeness"...BRING IT ON!
Thith pith ith delithuth.
n o o o o o o ... [sound of lobster wonky screaming] ... it may be true ...
I keep coming back to look at @karasti wonderful fellow veg. They just ooze nutrition. How wonderful.
I kind of felt bad having to cut it up, lol. Gardening time is my favorite time of year. It's an amazing process to follow (it is almost time to start seedlings, yay!!) To pick raspberries that are just being hit by the morning sun to put in my yogurt, to dig up potatoes for dinner, it's the best time of the year.
At least you got photos of them. Maybe...with the advent of gmo veggies, they'll start taking their own selfies...rue the day...