“Ugly” Fruit, Beautiful Idea: My Week with an Oddbox

Look, I’ll be honest. I’ve never been particularly turned on by vegetables. Courgettes don’t thrill me. A knobbly parsnip doesn’t stir the soul. And don’t get me started on those sad supermarket apples that taste like sugared drywall. But then along came Oddbox, the plucky little veg-delivery start-up that doesn’t give a flying fig if your aubergine is asymmetrical.

The idea’s simple. Farmers grow food. Retailers reject food. Oddbox collects that rejected food and ships it to folks like me in recyclable boxes with a note that says something vaguely inspirational about waste. And suddenly, you’re a bloody hero for eating a wonky carrot.

So, I signed up. And at 6:07 a.m. on a drizzly Tuesday, a box of misfits landed on my doorstep like a protestor crashing a royal wedding. Inside? A chunky cucumber with the kind of bend you’d see in a plumbing diagram. A tomato the size of a toddler’s fist. A cauliflower that looked like it had been in a pub fight. But here’s the thing : they tasted great.

That cucumber? Crisp, refreshing, the perfect foil to a splash of rice vinegar and a pinch of Maldon salt. The tomatoes? Sweet as stolen strawberries in July. The cauliflower? Roasted with cumin, it sang. And by “sang,” I mean it tasted like something Ottolenghi would charge you £18 for in Notting Hill.

But Oddbox isn’t just about dinner - it’s about doing good while still having something smug to post on Instagram. They rescue food destined for landfill because it’s the wrong shape, colour, or simply surplus. And while that might sound like the kind of wholesome nonsense your mate Sophie bangs on about at her zero-waste supper club, it’s also shockingly effective. Since launching, Oddbox claims to have saved thousands of tonnes of food and millions of litres of water. That’s not a flex : that’s a food revolution.