Culinary Misfits, the ugly food catering

Each and every day large quantities of food are  thrown away. Consumers want flawless-looking, “perfect” food, so supermarkets, farmers and restaurants  throw out disheveled food.

Culinary Misfitsis a catering service based in Berlin that uses crooked or unusual fruits and vegetables, that would  normally be discarded due to their imperfections, to create delicious and creative recipes from them. 

Berlin designers Lea Emma Rosa Brumsack and Tanja Krakowski, who founded the small start up in early 2012, collect veggies and fruits themselves and co-operate with two local organic farmers who let them have their abandoned harvest to a truly fair price- a substantial extra income for the farmers and a basis of business for Lea and Tanja. 

The project aims at raising awareness of how much food is thrown away. According to ARTE, about half of the harvest produced in the EU every year are wasted or fed to animals instead of being consumed by humans, only for the fact of being ugly. They are “culinary misfits”: too small, too big, too curved or too straight to please the consumers. Therefore they don’t reach the supermarket shelves.

In a series of food events Lae and Tanja create  extraordinary dishes recipes, where their love for design extends also to their food presentation, showing that there is much more beauty in variation than in an homogeneity and flawlessness. The final aim is to inspire consumers to eat the whole harvest in all its diversity. 

Now a crowdfunding campaing is underway to allow Culinary Misfits to have their own place for cooking, experimenting, lecturing and selling the little misfits.