A Brief Carrot Warning

Do you ever go on one of those life-improvement binges in which you vow to actually eat your vegetables, for once? And you decide to start with carrots, because, well, carrots are less like vegetables than other vegetables? Yeah, me too.

And now I know the awful truth about baby carrots.

They are not really baby carrots.

This may explain why they are not really very good.

They are actually carrots -- you will be relieved to hear -- not space aliens or weird elongated orange fungus or plasticized mutant vegetable product. Well, actually, they are pretty much plasticized mutant vegetable product. They are grown-up carrots that have been wittled down to teeny-carrot size. The story starts when a California farmer was brainstorming solutions for unshapely carrots, which consumers do not like. And if you've grown carrots, you know that they don't all grow long and slender. And they tend to get weird offshoots. One spectacular way to witness this is the Oregon State Fair, which has an annual Cutest Vegetable Competition. That's Oregon for you. Anyway, the winning Cute Vegetable is usually a carrot, because of their tendency to sprout little offshoots, like a strange small cute orange person, or a mandrake.

So this California carrot professional, faced with mutant carrots, started wittling, and baby carrots were born. Now they have machines that babyfy them. And they use a specially fast-growing variety of carrot, so it can hurry up and get to the size where it can be wittled down again. And then they can charge you more. Yesterday, for instance, down at the Safeway, grown-up whole macho big carrots were $1.39 per bag, and baby carrots were $1.99 for the same size of bag.

But this fast-growing variety of carrots tastes woodier than normal big carrots, and less sweet. "Baby" carrots sounds tenderer and juicier, doesn't it? Like baby lettuce. Cuter, even. But these are not really babies! They're lopped-off sticks of orange wood! Why am I once again reminded of that Monty Python sketch where the pet-shop owner offers to convert a terrier into a fish? "Just take off the back legs..."

So this is a public service announcement in case a) you wanted to get an actual okay-tasting vegetable into your diet, b) you weren't aware that mutant carrot products were cheating in the quest for Cutest Vegetable.