Backing the underdog in the eternal contest between ugliness and beauty | OPINION

It ain't pretty. Some have glimpsed it and wished they hadn't.

Others recoiled in disgust when I waved it in front of them and asked if they would like to touch it.

Here it is. Damn ugly thing, right? All gnarled and shrivelled and covered in age spots. And are those little hairs sprouting at its end?

Little wonder no-one wants to go near it. My wife laughed when I first showed it to her.

Then she looked away in embarrassment. "Put that thing away," she snapped.

"And stop touching it."

But there was no way I was leaving the supermarket without buying that deformed carrot.

It had been buried in a display box beneath dozens of perfectly formed carrots with such glowing orange skins they must have undergone a decent session in the local tanning salon.

Uncovering that misshapen vegetable was like watching the Hunchback of Notre Dame in a Miss Universe contest.

Sometimes you just have to back the underdog in the eternal contest between ugliness and beauty.

Surely that moment arrived for us all after evidence given this week to the Senate inquiry investigating the market power of supermarkets.

Guy Gaeta, an orchardist from Orange in New South Wales, warned that Australia's family farms will disappear in the next few years unless farmers are paid fair prices for their produce.

"People don't understand how ruthless the supermarkets are," Gaeta said before his appearance.

"Just to sell a zucchini it has to be perfectly straight - pretty soon they will expect bananas to be straight, believe me."

The Greens-led inquiry is investigating allegations of price gouging and profiteering by the supermarket chains.

But this week's evidence also exposed our own double standards. We may cheer the battle against corporate predators like Coles and Woolworths. But we're not so supportive when it comes to the endless war waged by nature against our farmers.

Blotchy apples, stunted bananas and pears with the skins of pubescent teenagers don't cut it anymore.

Superficiality always wins and it's not the sole fault of the supermarkets.

You can blame them for conditioning us to expect perfection.

But in this era of silicon breasts, creaseless foreheads and bee-stung lips, aren't they simply serving consumer demand?

Increasing numbers of retailers devote small sections to "ugly" fruit and vegetables which they flog at discounted prices.

But these are also marketed to shoppers like 19th century circus freak shows.

You half expect to find a moustachioed spruiker out the front with a bullhorn: "See the bearded lady posing as a stringy corn cob! Witness the Elephant Man disguised as a bulbous eggplant!"

This country produces a staggering eight million tonnes of food waste each year. More than 2600 gigalitres of water - the equivalent of five Sydney harbours - is wasted on fruit and vegetables that never make it to our plates.

Research shows 23 per cent of apples and a fifth of onions grown in the UK are destroyed because they do not measure up the exacting standards of buyers and consumers.

The push for high-density housing and the near impossibility of home ownership for so many means increasing numbers of us no longer understand or are even curious about where our food comes from.

Only those fortunate enough to grow their own produce, where bugs, birds, soil imbalances and unpredictable weather turn the backyard veggie patch into a battleground, can comprehend the true hurdles farmers face.

But there are rewards.

Growing your own is akin to owning a time machine.

It takes you back to the era before refrigeration technology of the 1980s allowed producers and retailers to chill fruit and vegetables for months - triggering the pursuit of longevity over flavour.

People once ate bananas only when the skins had browned because they were at their tastiest.

Not like today's chalky and pallid monstrosities.

Lumpy tomatoes, often bruised and mottled, would burst in your mouth and tingle like fairy floss.

These days you might as well bite into a cricket ball. And that variety of apples dubbed Delicious?

They were exactly that - not the tasteless imposters served up now.

There's a lot we can justifiably rage against when it comes to the food industry and the Coles-Woolworths duopoly.

Yet we're also to blame for this country's appalling food waste by allowing style to triumph over substance.

That ugly carrot I bought? It certainly offended the eye. But all it took was one bite to reveal its true beauty.

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