Hunters

A field guide to hunter-type minds

The best fruit never makes it to the shelf.

In every Australian supermarket there's a machine that decides which fruit you're allowed to see. Too big, too small, too curved, too marked — perfectly good fruit, graded out for failing a spec it never agreed to.

We run the same machine on minds. This site is about the ones it rejects — ADHD, dyslexia, autism. The hunters. Not deficient. Not disordered. Built for a different landscape.

Follow the belt

SECONDS REJECTED SPEC CHECK TO THE SHELVES →

Part one — the sorting machine

Graded before you ever see it.

Before a banana reaches a supermarket shelf in Australia, it has passed more exams than most of us sit in a lifetime. There are specifications for its length, its curve, its colour stage, the cleanness of its skin. Apples are graded on diameter bands and the percentage of blush on their cheeks. This isn't folklore — the spec sheets are real documents:

Here is the part worth sitting with: none of these tests measure taste. None of them measure nutrition. They measure conformity to a cosmetic standard — how closely each piece of fruit resembles the idea of fruit the system was built around. And the rejects don't vanish. They're ploughed back in, juiced, or trucked away — one Victorian cattle farmer took delivery of more than twenty semi-trailer loads of perfectly edible, oddly-sized citrus in a single season, as stockfeed.

Too big

A strawberry the size of a plum, sweeter than either. It won't sit neatly in the punnet, so it never gets one.

Rejected

Too small

An apple a few millimetres under the diameter band. Same tree, same juice, same crunch. Under spec.

Rejected

Wrong shape

A carrot that grew two legs. Peels the same, roasts the same, tastes the same. Too interesting for the shelf.

Rejected

Marked skin

Hail kissed the orchard for ten minutes in October. The apples are spotless inside. Doesn't matter.

Rejected
78%

Of the bananas discarded on North Queensland farms, a peer-reviewed study found 78% were thrown out for purely cosmetic imperfections — about 37,000 tonnes a year, from one crop, in one corner of one country. The researchers' conclusion: the standards driving it have little bearing on safety or nutrition.White, Gallegos & Hundloe (2011), Public Health Nutrition. When Harris Farm Markets began selling “imperfect” produce in 2014, it cited industry figures of around 25% of major fruit and vegetable lines going to waste nationally.

Part two — the plot twist

Then the supermarkets noticed something.

The fruit they'd been rejecting was fine. Better than fine. So they started selling it — under cheerful names, at friendlier prices — and Australians bought it by the tonne.

Harris Farm Markets · 2014

“Imperfect Picks”

First to formally relax the spec, selling wonky and blemished produce for less. The chain says it has since kept more than 50 million kilograms of fruit and veg from going to waste.

Woolworths · 2014

“The Odd Bunch”

Misshapen, undersized, oddly marked — rebadged from failure to character. Woolworths says it has sold over 300,000 tonnes of Odd Bunch produce that would otherwise have been wasted.

Coles · 2019

“I'm Perfect”

Launched after hailstorms marked up to 90% of one Adelaide Hills grower's apples — spotless inside. The name is the whole argument: the fruit didn't change, the label did.

And here's the tell. When drought and panic-buying emptied shelves in 2020, and again when Cyclone Jasper flattened banana farms in 2023, the supermarkets quietly relaxed their specifications — rain-marked bananas appeared on shelves with little apologetic signs. The rules bend whenever the system needs them to. Which tells you what they were never about: the fruit.

One more thing worth noticing: the odd fruit still sells for less. The apology comes with a discount sticker on it. The spec survived.

The fruit was never the problem.
The specification was.

Part three — the parallel

We run the same machine on minds.

A modern school is, among kinder things, a grading line. So is a lot of modern work. Sit still, in rows, at one pace. Read letters in strict left-to-right order. Feel a moderate amount, show less. Attend to what you're told to attend to, for exactly as long as you're told to attend to it.

A mind that scans the whole room instead of settling gets graded attention deficit. A mind that reads the world in pictures and wholes before letters gets graded dyslexic — literally, “trouble with words”, as if words were the only way in. A mind that feels everything at full volume and finds deep patterns where others see noise gets graded disordered.

Most of the people running this machine mean well. Teachers, doctors, worried grandparents. That's what makes it hard to see: the machine came with labels, and the labels all end in “disorder”. Almost nobody stops to ask who wrote the spec.

OUT OF SPEC DISORDERED? DIFFERENT. THE STANDARD ON GRADE →

This isn't an accident of history — it is history. In Empire of Normality, autistic philosopher Robert Chapman traces where the “normal mind” came from. It's a recent invention — younger than the steam engine that demanded it. Before the industrial era, nobody was normal, because normal hadn't been invented yet — there were just people, differently useful in different seasons. Then work moved into factories, bodies and minds were measured against the rhythm of machines, statisticians turned the average person into the ideal person, and medicine began grading everyone against that average as if it were a law of nature.

The banana spec and the “normal mind” are the same kind of thing. Both were written for the convenience of the system doing the sorting. Neither says anything about what's inside.

Part four — the hunters

Before there were farms, nobody was disordered.

In the 1990s, Thom Hartmann offered a lens that thousands of families recognised instantly. For nearly all of human history, he pointed out, we survived by hunting and foraging — work that rewards a mind that scans constantly, notices everything, acts in an instant, chases novelty, and can lock onto a moving target with total focus. Then farming arrived, and with it a new job description: repetitive, patient, steady, the same field every day.

The farmer's virtues became the spec. The hunter's virtues became symptoms. Scans everything became “distractible”. Acts in an instant became “impulsive”. Locks on completely became “obsessive”. Hartmann called it being a hunter in a farmer's world — and he was honest about what kind of claim it is: “It's not hard science, and was never intended to be.” It's a lens. But look what the lens shows. One small study of the Ariaal people of northern Kenya found men carrying a dopamine-gene variant linked to ADHD were better nourished in nomadic communities — and worse off in settled villages. Same trait. Different landscape. Opposite verdict.

Michael Joseph Ferguson's The Drummer and the Great Mountain takes the lens further. His premise, in his own words: ADD/ADHD is “a neurological type, not a disorder”. The hunter-type isn't a broken farmer to be repaired but a different kind of person to be provisioned — with rhythm instead of routine, a vision worth chasing instead of pressure, and an environment that actually fits.

Hartmann was writing about ADHD. But the pattern generalises: every neurotype in the odd bunch is a mind graded by a machine that was built for someone else.

Put a hunter in a wheat field and you get a problem child.
Put the same hunter on a hunt and you get dinner.

What the chart says
What the field notes say
Distractible
Scans the whole horizon, misses nothing
Impulsive
Moves the moment the moment comes
Obsessive
Capable of total devotion to what matters
Can't sit still
Built for motion, not for chairs
Daydreamer
Runs simulations of worlds that don't exist yet
Too sensitive
Hears what everyone else misses
Won't follow the steps
Found a shorter path

Part five — the field guide

A field guide to the odd bunch.

Different tunings, not different amounts of broken. The hard parts are real — and so is everything else in the crate.

ADHD

The Scanner

wide-angle attention, lightning reflexes

  • Attention that hunts — it goes where the interest is, and when it locks on, hyperfocus can outlast everyone in the building
  • Consistently strong divergent thinking: more ideas, stranger ideas, faster
  • Overrepresented among entrepreneurs and founders — restlessness is a feature when the map keeps changing
  • Often superb in a crisis, when the world finally moves at the right speed

The spec calls it a deficit of attention. It's an economy of attention — spent by interest, not by instruction.

Dyslexia

The Navigator

big pictures, connected worlds

  • Big-picture, connect-the-dots reasoning — seeing the whole system where others see a page of parts
  • In one landmark study, around a third of the US entrepreneurs surveyed showed signs of dyslexia — several times the general rate
  • GCHQ, Britain's signals-intelligence agency, deliberately recruits dyslexic analysts and calls dyslexic thinking “mission critical”
  • Strong oral storytelling and problem-solving — thinking in scenes and systems rather than strings of symbols

The word literally means “trouble with words” — a label written by people who were only testing words. In 2022, LinkedIn added “Dyslexic Thinking” as an official skill.

Autism

The Pattern-Seer

deep focus, honest signal

  • Exceptional pattern recognition and systemising — finding the rule beneath the noise
  • Deep, durable focus that builds real expertise, not surface familiarity
  • Precision and honesty the research keeps confirming: saying the true thing, noticing the wrong note, caring that details are right
  • Sought out for exactly this: Australia's Dandelion Program places autistic specialists in software testing and cybersecurity with government agencies, and employers from SAP to JPMorgan run dedicated autism hiring programs

Intensity isn't a malfunction. Some instruments are simply more sensitive — you don't fix a seismograph by dulling it.

Dyspraxia · Tourette's · dyscalculia · and more

The Rest of the Crate

every tuning the spec never planned for

  • Each label in the pile marks a mind that solves the world by a different route
  • Most people in the crate carry more than one label — the tunings travel together
  • An estimated one person in five is neurodivergent. When a spec fails one fruit in five, audit the spec

“Divergent” only means anything if you've decided where everyone was supposed to be going.

An honest note

None of this pretends the hard parts away. Hunters burn out, melt down, lose the car keys, and grieve in school corridors built for someone else's stride. Support, adjustments and rest are not admissions of defect — a wheelchair user isn't “broken” for needing a ramp, and a hunter isn't broken for needing a different classroom. The neurodiversity movement's claim was never “no one struggles”. It's that the struggle is largely a mismatch between person and environment — and unlike a person, an environment can be redesigned.

Part six — the bookshelf

Where this thinking comes from.

Robert Chapman Empire of Normality

The history of the spec. Chapman traces how the “normal mind” was invented alongside industrial capitalism, and how medicine learned to grade people against a machine's rhythm. The deep argument under this whole site: disablement lives in the mismatch, not in the person.

Michael Joseph Ferguson The Drummer and the Great Mountain

The owner's manual. A guidebook for hunter-type minds: energy management, rhythm over routine, a life vision worth chasing. In the parable that opens it, the drummer reaches the Great Mountain not by strength but by wit — which is the hunter's way through most things.

Thom Hartmann ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer's World

The original lens. Written by a father after his son's diagnosis, it first asked: what if these traits aren't damage, but a different inheritance? Hartmann never claimed it was hard science — read it as a way of seeing, and it remains one of the great reframes.

Not deficient. Not disordered. Not damaged. Different.

An estimated one person in five is built like this — seeing what the other 80% walk past, because they were never wired to walk past it. If you've just been handed a label, for yourself or for your kid, read the field notes before you grieve.

You may be holding a hunter.

Perfectly good fruit

Keep reading

Two more pages from the orchard.

For anyone holding the stamp

The Bruise

Fruit doesn't bruise on the shelf — it bruises in the handling. What happens when a growing child is handed deficit, disorder and impairment as the official story of their own mind, and what the research already shows about where that leads.

Read The Bruise → For anyone raising a hunter

The Orchard

You don't grade an orchard — you tend it. Seven principles for an education built around hunter-type kids, the real schools already doing it (several of them Australian), and what a parent can do inside the school they've actually got.

Read The Orchard →