Ugly carrots go in the juice bin. Carrots surprisingly are some of the least wasteful vegetable crops that we grow.

Leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, arugula etc have a very short shelf life and some of the most waste. Strawberries, raspberries etc are the worst for waste due to molds.

Sadly it's not just aesthetics for why these vegetables are rejected at the grocery store. It's also for food safety as well. If you are picking them up out of the garden, washing them off, chopping them up and eating them immediately you have almost no risk of foodborne disease (unless you fertilized with straight manure a few weeks before).

Top grade produce needs to be uniform and easily cleaned so it can be shipped and not harbor diseases.

Iceberg lettuce became popular because the exterior of the lettuce can get all covered in crap during harvest and handling. Then you remove a few leaves from the outside and in the interior is mostly clean.

Something you might not know is that cantaloupes have shifted to a major different genetic groups in North America the past 15 years. The older varieties were a dark green immature. The newer ones are a grey green immature color. The netting on on grey green is much lower, finer and easier to clean. Anyone remember the listeria outbreaks from Colorado? This is the lasting change.

That would be horribly wasteful, and a loss for the producer. "Ugly produce" gets chopped and sold that way instead. You can't tell what a pre-chopped bag of peppers looked like.

@SaveTheTuaHawk @YaDownWitCPP that will change out of necessity in the near future. There has always been a garden in my life and the deformed were always eaten.