Culture
The Difference Choosing Ugly Vegetables Can Make
A Berlin café called Culinary Misfits makes the most of local food by cooking with cast-off produce.
A carrot that stands on two crooked legs. A tomato with a pointy knob growing out of its head. A radish with a nose: Odd, misshapen vegetables are almost always discarded by supermarkets looking to sell the myth of perfection, but they also are charming and somehow human.
It was with this assurance that the Berlin duo Culinary Misfits got its start. A wooden plaque just inside the entrance of its shop and café conveys its ethos in German. "Misfits are culinary eccentrics," the plaque reads, and it ends with a call to action: Esst die ganze Ernte! or "Eat the entire harvest!"