Sometimes, established cultural patterns no longer serve, maybe they never have. Take food waste that stems from unusually shaped produce. Whoever determined that carrots had to be straight and shaped just so? Not two legs, definitely not three or more legs, only one single root leg, although children delight in detecting animal and human forms in some of these odd shaped root vegetables. That Bell peppers shouldn't be gnarly? That all apples in a bag had to be the same size? Or that potatoes should be nice and evenly round? Odd shapes of course do not alter the taste or nutritional content one bit.

According to the website Ugly Produce is Beautiful, in the US annually "about 6 billion pounds of producego largely unharvested or unsold for aesthetic reasons." That is insane! What hubris. It's not new news that we don't have to produce more food to stave off world hunger, but that world hunger stems from distribution and waste problems. Industrialization of the food distribution system made packaging of evenly shaped produce more convenient, although square watermelons did not make it into the mainstream, and supermarkets like the display quality of evenly shaped produce.

The art of living deeply entails inspecting and questioning cultural patterns so that you do something because it makes sense to you, not because everyone else does it - the lemming syndrome. Through our CSA we get whatever produce is harvested, even or odd shaped, regular or irregular. And awareness about so-called ugly produce is growing in all industrialized countries. I just signed up for deliveries of ugly organic produce at half price. Delivered to my door. Counters food waste. Couldn't be more convenient.