Ugly vegetables...

My generous and good friend gave me a box of sweet potatoes last week.  They didn't look like sanitized supermarket sweet potatoes, to be sure.  And they supposedly needed more curing to store well.

Some of them were VERY large, and warty-looking.  Some had been nibbled on, she thought, by field mice.  And there were oddities on their skins, too, perhaps caused by "wireworms."

The glass bowl is a full quart, just to provide some perspective. The half sweet potato is 5" wide X 4" high.

I've never grown sweet potatoes successfully myself (woodchucks ate the shoots as quickly as I could plant them), but I was interested, too, of course.

A participant in a class later in the week, spotting the box in the back of my car (curing in the warm weather), asked "Are they still edible?" 

I said, yes, of course, they're just not cleaned up like our supermarket sweet potatoes (and clearly all of the large and unusually shaped ones must go somewhere else than our human food stream, as I've never seen any that looked quite like these before).

However, I've now roasted, peeled, and eaten some -- they're delicious.

It reminds me of how important gleaning work is, and the importance, too, of recognizing what's good food, even when not "beautiful."