Sok sends pictures. He's been growing mangoes for our supplier in northern Thailand for fourteen years, and on Thursdays he texts a small gallery from the orchard, mostly mangoes, occasionally a dog. The mangoes are not the ones you'd see at a grocery store. They are too small, slightly dented, sometimes the color of a sunburn. They are the ones we want.
"A grocery shelf rejects roughly thirty percent of fresh fruit on appearance alone."
What "ugly" actually means.
A grocery shelf rejects roughly thirty percent of fresh fruit on appearance alone. A small bruise, a scar from a leaf, a shape that doesn't fit the box. None of it affects flavor. Most of the time it affects flavor in the right direction — the fruit ripened on the tree, the sugars are concentrated, the skin is honest about it. The shelf throws it out anyway.
Freeze-drying does not care about shape. Once the fruit is sliced, the dryer treats every piece the same. So the ugly mango — the small one, the dented one, the slightly sunburned one — gets the same gentle four-hour-from-farm cycle as a beauty queen. It comes out as bright as anything else, often brighter.
Sunburned and delicious.
Why we pay more for them.
We pay our growers a premium for "ugly" lots. Not because we're being virtuous about it — because the math works out. The fruit is sweeter, the loss to grocery channels is lower, and the ones that need a home find one. The premium isn't large. It's enough that the orchards we work with are slowly stopping their cosmetic culls.
If you've ever wondered why a piece of OhCrisp mango tastes like more mango than the cube of mango it came from, this is part of the reason. The piece you're eating was, on day zero, already an extra-good piece of mango. The dryer just kept it that way.
One more thing.
Sok's dog's name is Khao. He has a column in the gallery now. We will publish his portrait in a future edition of the journal.