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Mutatoes

The Mutato-Archive is a collection of non-standard fruits, roots and vegetables, displaying a dazzling variety of forms, colors and textures.
  The complete absence of botanical anomalies in our supermarkets has caused us to regard the consistency of produce presented there as natural. Produce has become a highly designed, monotonous product. Today we have a clearly defined image of how, for example, an apple or a tomato should look like, and we regard anything that deviates from this norm with mistrust, at times even disgust. Be-cause these "ideals of beauty" have become so established, massive amounts of fruit and vegetables have to be discarded, even though they are perfectly edible. Only those that are visually flawless can reach the market.
  It is not only the natural occurrence of morphological irregularities in the growth of single plants that is being suppressed and filtered out by our food system. Even though there are literally thousands of varieties of any domesticated fruit or vegetable, only a tiny fraction is being grown and distributed today. A few high yielding, "good looking" varieties are displacing the once rich and diverse repertoire of agricultural cultivars. A vast majority of our crop varieties have become extinct within the last 50 years. The detachment of the people from the land, from the processes of food production has allowed this extinction to happen behind the scenes, without public awareness. The ever increasing amount of processed foods and food imports have also contributed to the illusion that the diversity of our food supply is increasing, not declining.
  We have forgotten, and in many cases never experienced the way fruits, roots, and vegetables can actually look (and taste). The Mutato-Project serves to document the rich spectrum of colors and shapes of agricultural cultivars and to win back public demand and acceptance of visual and culinary diversity.