[image via Bent Objects]
Did you ever wonder where those perfect little carrots come from?
Those marvels of the produce aisle, so uniform in shape, size, and color, like no carrot found in nature. You’ve had your suspicions; you’ve heard the rumors.
It’s all true: carrots- yes; babies-no.
True baby carrots are a specialty crop that’s grown to be harvested before maturity. The supermarket version is a manufactured product. It starts with full-sized, fully-grown carrots that are snipped into 2-inch sections, pumped through water-filled pipes into giant whirling peelers, whittled down to lovable niblets, and bathed in a mold retardant before they’re packed in plastic bags for shipping. Organic carrot growers use a citrus-based product called Citrix, but the conventional baby-cuts in your supermarket were treated with chlorine to prolong shelf life.
The baby carrots we’ve come to know were invented in the late 1980′s. Supermarkets have always demanded carrots of uniform size and shape, with no lumps, bumps, spots, or twists. One California carrot farmer had grown tired of culling the imperfect and irregular carrots from his crop. Up to 70% of his harvest would end up discarded or sold at a discounted price for juice and animal feed. He started experimenting with green bean trimmers and potato peelers, dabbling first with 1-inch rounds that he marketed as ‘bunny balls’ before settling on 2-inch thumbs, and an industry was transformed. Ironically, we now pay a premium price for the former cast-offs.
The baby-cut boom has changed the way carrots are grown. The ideal carrot used to be bulky-topped and steeply tapered, grown to a standard 6½ inches for the best fit in 0ne- and two-pound plastic bags. Now growers shoot for long, narrow cylinders. The length gets them more cuts—it’s gone from the original two cuts per carrot to three and even four cuts from 8+ inch behemoths. Straight and narrow means they can be planted closer together for more yield per acre, and less is wasted when they’re carved into the baby carrot shape.
Before the advent of the baby-cut, annual carrot consumption in the U.S. was a steady 6 pounds a year per person. It started climbing in 1986 and topped 11 pounds per person by 2007. We snack on them, throw them into soups and stews, entertain with baby-cuts and dip, put them in lunch boxes, and order them at fast food restaurants. The carrot industry’s Eat’em Like Junk Food campaign has even pushed ‘scarrots’ as a dubious alternative to Halloween candy.
I know what you’re going to say.
Of course it’s cheaper, healthier, and better for the environment to buy whole carrots from a local grower. But we’re eating twice as many fresh carrots as we used to. It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.
Cut open a passion fruit and it’s a confusing mass of juicy, seedy pulp. It’s all edible, although you might want to strain out the seeds. Passion fruit is boldly tropical, and the sweetness and assertive flavor make it versatile in cooking and baking. There is a Passion of Christ/passion fruit connection that makes a whole lot of symbolic hooey, likening the vine’s tendrils to whips and its petals to the Apostles. Not Judas and Peter, though.
Yes, you are looking at a strawberry. The pineberry looks like strawberries and cream but smells and tastes just like pineapple. Tiny white berries with red pips, it’s a wild variety that was rescued from extinction, rechristened as the pineberry, and is now grown commercially.
I suggest that you find someone with a backyard pacay tree and make them your friend. Technically a legume, pacay pods don’t travel well, and you’ll only find frozen ones in the market; the fresh pods are worth the hunt. Crack open the hard shell and inside you’ll find a row of black seeds nestled in a bed of fluffy white flesh that tastes like vanilla ice cream with a hint of cotton candy.
Mangosteen is not at all mango-like. It’s sweet, tangy, and somewhat fibrous. Skip the astringent purple rind and go for the juicy white flesh around the seeds that comes apart in segments like a tangerine. It’s rarely baked into desserts, but fresh, uncooked mangosteen works well in sorbets and smoothies.
