18 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
in Puyallup, Washington, said, “As a
farmer, I don’t have the luxury of de-
termining what’s ugly or not. It’s mar-
ketplace-driven.” Grocery chains and
high-end restaurants follow the De-
partment of Agriculture’s specifica-
tions, or their own standards, when it
comes to size and degrees of spoilage.
“Wholesalers always need consistent
quality products,” Mike Nolan, of Earth
Spring Farm, in Carlisle, Pennsylva-
nia, said. “They’re not going to be able
to deal with peeling a two-legged or
twisted carrot.”
Less stringent than wholesalers are
retailers, including the farmers’ own farm
stands. Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht, of Gar-
den of Eve Organic Farm and Market,
in Riverhead, New York, said, “Our cus-
tomers buy directly from us, so we have
a chance to explain things to them and
ask for a little tolerance. Like, we used
to grow Armenian cucumbers. If you
pick them at the exact, perfect time,
they’re two feet long and they curl. They
kind of look like snakes. But if you let
them go another week they’re three feet
long and curly. And if you let them go
even longer they’re curled baseball bats.
They’re still edible, but they’re so big
that no one has any idea what they are.”
Even more forgiving are the farmers
themselves, who are ready to meet the
challenges posed by pests (Sherry Dudas,
of Honey Brook Organic Farm, in Pen-
nington, New Jersey, said, “It looks like
I’ll be eating all our apricots that got hit
by plum curculio this year”) and by size
(Kaplan-Walbrecht recalled a sweet po-
tato the size of her daughter’s head).
And what about produce that’s sowho ended up at Ivy League schools,
and I knew kids who ended up in jail,”
he said. “So, when I got to college, my
thing was ‘I know for a fact that there
are kids stuck on the corner, hustling,
who are way smarter than these punk-
ass white kids who are here bullshitting
and skipping class.’” Craft is a white
kid, too, and, he said, “I spent a lot of
time thinking about that—my privilege
and shit—trying to study it systemi-
cally.” He designed his own major: Urban
Education and Social Justice. “I hate
how that term has been co-opted,” he
said. “But whatever. Real motherfuck-
ers still rock with ‘social justice.’”
After college, he started making free-
style videos in his bedroom and post-
ing them to YouTube. “The goal was
never to be Mr. Woke Guy,” he said.
“The goal was to make music about shit
that’s on my mind.” His new album’s
lead single, “Gang Shit,” continues in
his Woke Guy tradition. Craft raps each
verse from a different character’s per-
spective: a racist white cop, a Klansman,
and an African-American serving a
prison sentence for armed robbery. The
thesis is that each character participates
in a form of “gang shit” but that, as the
last one puts it, “my gang got me in jail,
and yours got you home in bed.”
About a half hour later, after his en-
tourage had grown to more than a dozen,
Craft started walking north. “My cousin
Frankie lives down the block,” La Rosa
said. “We gotta stop in for one drink.”
Craft looked nervous, but he relented.
In Frankie’s apartment were a dozen
more people, smoking hookah and lis-
tening to Fat Joe. Frankie handed around
shots of Fireball.
“I’m good,” Craft said.
“At least fake it for the video,” La
Rosa said, filming. They toasted—“Hell’s
Kitchen boys!”—and Craft took the
shot, but it didn’t help his nerves. “My
stomach hurts,” he said.
Eventually, they left and started walk-
ing toward the halal carts. When Craft
arrived, a cheer went up from the crowd.
A label rep put a cordless mike in his
hand. “Thanks to everybody that came
out to hear the album, to get some free
food,” he said. “Everybody else random
that’s here—like, ‘Who the fuck is this
guy with the Knicks jacket on?’—wel-
come to the motherfucking show.”
—Andrew Marantz
1
EATYOUR VEG ETAB LE S
U G LY
Y
ou did not anticipate this plot
point: you’ve decided to pony up
twenty-three fifty a week to receive a
regular shipment of organic “ugly pro-
duce,” perhaps because you’ve read that
about half of the produce in the United
States goes uneaten, or maybe because
you’ve been charmed by a Web site that
boasts of “rescuing” foodstuffs such as
“onions that are too small, potatoes
that are shaped like your favorite ce-
lebrity, and carrots that fell in love and
got twisted together.” You glow with a
sense of mission. But, when your first
shipment of ugly produce arrives and
you peer inside the recyclable card-
board box, you do a double take: the
produce is not ugly. And not a single
potato looks like Abe Vigoda.
“I would first redefine it as misfit
produce,” Abhi Ramesh, the founder
and C.E.O. of Misfits Market, said on
the phone the other day. (It is Misfits
Market’s Web site that is quoted above.)
“The market calls it ugly produce, but
‘ugly’ ends up being only a small por-
tion of it. The variations are standard:
produce that’s too small or too large or
that has slight discoloration.”
The economics of agriculture make
selling misshapen produce an expen-
sive proposition for farmers. “A lot of
times with off-grade produce, there’s a
scratch or a dent or a puncture, which
reduces shelf life dramatically,” Andrew
Rose, of New Sprout Organic Farms,
in Black Mountain, North Carolina,
said. His outfit sells to Misfits Mar-
ket’s competitor, Hungry Harvest.
Maybe beauty is only rind deep.
During three weeks’ worth of Misfits
Market deliveries this summer, one
customer received many delicious fruits
and vegetables, some of them slightly
undersized. But, on the ugliness front,
the offerings were community theatre,
not Broadway.
How do growers decide who gets
what? Amy Moreno-Sills, who, with
her husband, runs Four Elements Farm,