Getting 'ugly' but healthy produce onto tables

Emeryville, California

THE eggplants are crooked and a little long-necked, contorted enough that they would probably lose in a beauty pageant against rounder or more symmetrical aubergines.

In the field where they were grown or in the supermarkets for which they were once destined, they would presumably have been discarded. Not because they are inedible - simply because they do not make the aesthetic cut.

But the notion that real food has curves may be as catchy as the subversive advertising campaign on women's beauty.

"We find that it is really easy to convince people when they realise they can pay a fraction of the price to get the same kind of taste and health," said Ron Clark, the chief supply officer at Imperfect Produce, a San Francisco Bay Area startup that has bee…