“Wow, this carrot is shaped like a spaceship!”

As a child, I’d always been drawn to strangely shaped vegetables in the produce aisle: horseshoe eggplants, flat bell peppers, three-legged carrots...but as time passed, TV ads and perfect supermarket displays taught me that tomatoes should always be perfectly round, carrots straight and apples bright red. I was taught that what looked nice must taste nice.

Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) acts much like Vogue and Cosmopolitan, setting unrealistic beauty expectations on how produce ought to look, down to the exact color, shape and size. But appearance is a poor indicator of flavor, nutritional value and even freshness. Food stylists in TV ads have conditioned us to see pretty as delicious and nutritious. However, Linda Hagen, a professor of consumer behavior from the University of Southem Califomia, denies the connection between beauty and nutrition, explaining that it is just another marketing strategy used by food companies to increase sales.

In the United States alone, an estimated six billion pounds of ugly produce is left unharvested, unsold and uneaten every year. That’s enough food to feed three million people for a whole year!

The discarding of imperfect produce is not just wasteful; it also contributes significantly to climate change. Rotting produce creates large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more effective than carbon dioxide. When supermarkets toss away an ill-shaped tomato, they are also tossing away all of the fertilizer, water and energy that went into growing, storing and transporting that tomato.

I’ve decided to take this issue into my own hands. Working with local farms, markets, meal centers and food banks, I have rescued over 4, 500 pounds of edible, nutritious, often organic, ugly produce in my city. However, helping can be a lot easier than driving from farm to farm every weekend.

The “diet” in diet drinks maybe a false promise for some soda lovers. True, they deliver the taste of a soda experience, without the calories. Yet, new research shows they can also leave people with increased appetite.

A study published recently in JAMA Network open adds to the evidence that drinks made with sucralose, an artificial sweetener (甜味剂), may increase the appetite among some people. “We found females and overweight people had greater brain reward activity after consuming the artificial sweetener,” says study author Katie Page, a physician at the University of Southern California. Both groups ate more food after consuming drinks with sucralose, compared with after regular sugar-sweetened drinks. In contrast, the study found males and people of healthy weight did not have an increase in either brain reward activity or hunger response, suggesting they’re not affected in the same way.

One theory is that it’s not the artificial sweetener itself that has a direct effect on the body. The idea is that artificial sweeteners may confuse the body by tricking it into thinking sugar is coming. “You are supposed to get sugar after something tastes sweet,” explains Swithers, “Your body has been used to that.” But the sugar never arrives, which may lead to the body’s less efficiency in processing sugar that s consumed later.

Swithers’ lab has also documented that when animals with a history of consuming artificial sweeteners get real sugar, their blood sugar levels rise higher than those of animals not fed artificial sweeteners. “It’s a small effect, but overtime this could contribute to potentially significant consequences,” she says. If this is happening in some people who consume diet soda, it could add to the risk of Type 2 diabetes (糖尿病), because when blood sugar rises, the body has to release more insulin (胰岛素) to absorb the sugar. “So what you’re doing is that you are kind of pushing the system harder,” Swithers says.