Price of perfect-looking produce is rejection for 40 per cent that are misshapen

I like to eat weird-looking food, whether it's crisps or cauliflower.

I habitually seek the nonconformist food products: the intertwined "love carrots", the kiwi twins, the apples with codling moth damage, the kale leaves the cabbage loopers have nibbled. I picked up this habit while I was working on an organic farm in California, where we grew everything from strawberries to chard to sweet corn. When we harvested "seconds" - the perfectly edible, often slightly more delicious, fruits and veggies that weren't quite pretty enough to offer to our customers - they went directly to our own kitchen.

That farm was lucky to have a built-in community of people excited to consume the odd ones, but that's not how the rest of our food system works.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that high cosmetic standards in the retail industry exclude 20 to 40 per cent of fresh produce from the market.

Sometimes farmers can sell unwanted produce to processors making jam or pickles, but as those systems rely increasingly on mechanisation, they become less flexible when it comes to shape and size. Tonnes of food - 800 to 900 million tonnes globally each year - rot in storage or don't make it out of the fields because farmers can't find a market.

The organic farm where I worked marketed primarily through a farm stand and a subscription service, so we had the luxury of communicating directly with our customers about why our produce looked the way it did. But farmers selling through distributors face very different standards. Some criteria are rightly based on food-safety and shelf-life considerations, but many are misguided ideas about what produce should look like.