I can tell you about sweet potatoes. They vary widely in size and shape. Long skinny one to some the size of footballs. Not many the size you see in stores. When people are offered a good thing it will often be ruined by a greedy few who take advantage. Those who really could use the free food are the ones who suffer.
I know, Sheldon. Number one sweet potatoes are seven or eight inches long without blemishes. I suppose that some of the imperfect ones are canned. But many of those that are left in the fields are perfectly good to eat. It makes me so angry that some people took unfair advantage of the farmers generosity.
When I lived in washington State, and worked as an insurance agent, I traveled around most of the eastern half of the state. One of the areas where I went , in central Washington, was the fruit growing area, especially around Wenatchee, and the area around there. In the fall, I could get whole boxes of the fresh apples for under $5, and the apples were beautiful. When they choose the most perfect apples for those specialty boxes and each apple is indivually wrapped, they have to be absolutely blemish-free, and just the right size, and the rest are counted as culls, even though they were bigger, and much more perfect than the apples we found on sale at the stores. Since they were too large for the regular priced apples, and had a blemish and could not be sold for the expensive apples, they just sold them off by the box, for less that we would pay for regular apples at the grocery store. I came home with the back of the Mazda pickup loaded with boxes of apples that fall !
When we first moved to Laveen, Arizona, a farming community south of Phoenix, we saw huge truckloads of unusually-shaped somethings-or-other, being hauled southward on 51st. Ave., a popular "bypass" of the downtown congestion. One day, one of those things I spotted had bounced out of a truck, along the shoulder. Stopped, picked it up, seemed to be an odd-shaped potato, but pretty big, almost football-sized. Any guesses? Frank
@Sheldon Scott "I can tell you about sweet potatoes." I have yet to understand the difference between true sweet potatoes and yams. The stores call yams those having a twisty, squiggly shape.
You're not likely to ever see a yam if you live in the United States. Yams and sweet potatoes are completely different. I know what you mean though, @Frank Sanoica, I've seen cans in the stores with both names on the same can. I refuse to buy any product from a company that doesn't know what they are selling.
Living here in the back woods of the DR when people harvest their crops nothing goes to waist they collect all and anything that is not sold is given away to all the local people here. Just today a friend came by with a large bag of peppers and as soon as my wife got it got put into three other bags that went to other families close by.