Hey all, it’s Victoria.If you’ve read a farming blog or ridden a subway in the last few years, you may have seen an ad for one of a variety of programs that rescues and/or resells “ugly” produce. These services usually promote themselves as fighting food waste, and also evoke a sense of pity for the pitiful, misshapen carrot or pepper that might not get eaten without your compassionate intervention.My initial impulse when scrolling or walking past these ads is skepticism about their utility. I apologize! We’re a bunch of skeptics out here. I know these ads are furthering an excellent goal, especially since the USDA estimates that 30-40% of food produced in the US ends up as waste (https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs). But having worked in agriculture and also lived with human beings, I’ve seen far more produce lost to pests, temperature and storage problems, supply chain interruptions, or from personally ignoring the salad we KNOW we should eat in the crisper until it turns to slime. If that salad is irregular in any way, that only makes each of these hurdles more, not less, daunting. This holds true even though my explicit job, for two summers, was to be the person who picks out the ugly cucumbers.When I worked in the Horticulture department at NC State, one of our biggest projects was a cucumber production study involving the best planting densities for making pickles. This involved filling buckets with each day’s harvest, meticulously labelling them with a complex index card system, loading them on a truck bed, then dumping the contents into a grading machine and measuring the results. The grader was a huge green contraption with rows of different-sized teeth that shuffled the harvest down a conveyor belt and shot each one out into its own chute by size. My crew and I would dump the buckets, then stand at our designated chutes with the power stance of a goalie, ready to snatch out any oversized, undersized, rotten or weirdly shaped fruits before they had a chance to jam up the grader and grind our well-oiled machine to a halt. After they were sorted, weighed, double-checked and recorded, we would dump the results in a heap. These were research cucumbers, and thus wouldn’t be available for sale at any point. If we wanted, we could set aside a bucket to take home, and I probably skewed the average number of cucumbers eaten in the state that summer, but I only picked the best of the best for myself: The #2s, perfectly slender and without blemish.I have to admit, this experience made me a bit of a snob about cucumbers. In the unique conditions of our study, I got used to harvesting at one speed (super-fast) and selecting for one value when picking (anything bigger than a man’s thumb). I would hurl twenty-pound buckets without looking where they were going, kick trailing vines back into place with my boots, and had my pick from a truly staggering number of perfect specimens.Since our project was designed to collect information about processing cucumbers, our scale and our priorities were set by this need for speed, consistency, and uniformity. The purpose of grading had little to do with aesthetics, only what would smoothly move through the machines that would handle our crop. Still, even in a field that’s been organized and quantified from the ground up to produce a single, dependable product, some surprises managed to slip through, and I tossed them out without a thought.In contrast, I’ve spent this summer gently nurturing a crop of cucumber plants that are only now just starting to bear flowers. Fruit are still a far-off glimmer in my eye, and when they arrive they’ll be individually celebrated, gently cradled by mulch, and hand-picked with utmost tenderness. I know, I can hardly recognize myself. Throughout our cultivated acre, I’ve had to shift my perspective. Rather than knowing exactly what I’m looking for and processing it as fas