Over the past few decades, we’ve come to expect perfection from our fruits and vegetables while patronizing markets that sell only the most beautiful of produce. But have you every wondered what happens to fruits and vegetables that are less than attractive? It turns out these less desirable items are rejected from the very start, plowed under by farmers before they can ever reach the market.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), America devotes almost half of its land to agriculture, yet 40 percent of food goes to waste. Food wastage occurs along every step of the supply chain, from production to transport to processing and perhaps most importantly at home. And, food waste is one of the biggest contributors to U.S. landfills, where old vegetables and fruits end up rotting and releasing methane, a more harmful greenhouse gas than CO2.

“Eighty percent of our water, 10 percent of our energy, 40 percent of our land is used to grow our food,” Peter Lehner of the NRDC told NPR. “It’s crazy.”

Nature isn’t perfect. But does that qualify as a reason to waste so much food?

Of course, making better use of our food entails learning how not to waste it. How do we do this? One way is to shop more wisely and only buy produce that can realistically be consumed. Another is to alter our expectations of perfection to embrace misshapen and even ugly produce that is every bit as nutritious and edible as its comely counterparts.

The ‘Imperfect’ Solution

And that’s where a San Francisco Bay-area start-up called Imperfect Produce comes in. Bearing the tagline “Because all fruits and veggies deserve to be loved,” this scrappy young venture believes imperfect produce isn’t ugly, it’s simply “cosmetically challenged.” Imperfect has set out to change the way Americans view their produce by working with growers to source ugly fruits and vegetables direct from the farm, and deliver them to consumers so they can eat healthier at a price they can afford.

Imperfect is the latest venture of Ben Simon and Ben Chesler, who as college students founded a network to recover leftover food from campus dining halls. Passionate about keeping food from being wasted, they are redefining what is beauty in produce. And they’re doing so by incentivizing consumers with a discount. It works like this: you sign up for Imperfect’s services and you get a box of five to eight types of ugly fruits and vegetables delivered to your doorstep every week. The contents of the box change weekly depending on what is in season. And the cost is 30 to 50 percent less than you’d spend on perfect versions of the same produce in the store.

To source their ugly fruits and vegetables, the duo teamed up with Ron Clark, who had over 15 years’ experience working to bring similarly challenged produce to food banks across California. Now, in his role as chief supply officer for Imperfect, Clark uses his relationships with suppliers to buy ugly produce directly from California farmers at a discount and pass the savings on to the consumer.

“We find that it is really easy to convince people when they realize they can pay a fraction of the price to get the same kind of taste and health,” Clark told The New York Times. “Once one person is convinced, it doesn’t take much to get them to convert others.”

In July, the high end grocery chain Raley’s, with stores in California and Nevada, launched a pilot program in conjunction with Imperfect in 10 of its Northern California stores. They experimented with selling less-than-perfect red and green bell peppers, plums and pears from three growers in California at a 30 percent discount. In-store marketing was key to educating consumers how to look at ugly produce in new ways. Sadly, the results were less than perfect and the chain reportedly abandoned the venture in the fall.

Towards a sustainable, waste-free future

If selling ugly produce eventually catches on, it will involve devising a new harvesting and packing process starting at the farm. A handful of California-based broccoli and cauliflower farmers are already employing a co-packing system, in which workers pack premium heads in boxes for grocery stores and separate out less than perfect ones for crates destined for food banks. Other farmers have remained resistant, arguing that separating out the less desirable looking produce from what is currently salable is labor intensive, making it more cost effective to simply toss the food.

Some encouraging news came in September, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced the United States’ first ever food waste reduction goal, calling for a 50 percent reduction by 2030. “Let’s feed people, not landfills. By reducing wasted food in landfills, we cut harmful methane emissions that fuel climate change, conserve our natural resources, and protect our planet for future generations” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Already some producers, including Ocean Mist and HMC Farms, are donating some of their less-than-perfect produce to California food banks.

Meanwhile, Imperfect’s original campaign was 103% funded in May 2015 and by all accounts it’s off to a great start in the Bay area. Here’s hoping they make it across the U.S. to the East Coast soon. In the meantime, I’ll be demanding less perfection from my produce.

Check out Chris Hunt’s Five Easy Ways To Reduce Food Waste for things you can do now to eat smarter and waste less at home.