I bought some baby carrots for Hick to have with dip. You'd think it's a pretty simple side dish. I stir a packet of Hidden Valley Ranch Dip powder into a container of sour cream. Then I open a bag of baby carrots and rinse them off and pat them dry. Easy peasy. Several days of side dish.
I know that nobody runs a baby carrot farm. That you don't buy seeds to plant baby carrots. They are full-grown carrots that are cut and peeled and shaped by machines. I've never seen them on an episode of How It's Made, but I'm not an idiot. I'm sure you could find the process on YouTube if you wanted to see where baby carrots come from.
My bag of baby carrots looked just fine. Here's the other bag I bought at the same time:
Nothing unusual about that. Just baby carrots ready for chomping. I HOPE! Because there was something unusual in the first bag I opened.
That's no baby! It's more of an older, college brother. Thank goodness it wasn't a gnarled great grandaddy. I told Hick he could gnaw on it like Bugs Bunny, or I'd peel it and cut it up to go with the real babies. It's still in my Chinese Tupperware, so I guess I should get out my peeler.
How did this behemoth make it through to the end of the production line to get bagged? I would imagine there's some kind of sifter that lets a uniform size baby fall through. That would seem more economical than hiring PEOPLE to stand at a conveyor and toss out the giants. But what do I know? Maybe it's just another case of NOBODY DOING A JOB CORRECTLY.
Or maybe a case of a MACHINE not doing a job correctly.
It does seem odd that the one large carrot got into the mix. I remember eating real baby carrots when I was growing them in the yard, once they were big enough I would pull every second carrot to leave space for the rest to grow full size and we ate the baby carrots steamed with other veggies. Now I just buy regular carrots and ignore the packs of "baby" ones.
ReplyDeleteThe year we had a garden, we ate three baby carrots. That's because I didn't want to leave them for the rabbits to eat, like most of the rest of our crop. All while we had five cats, who loved to lie around the edge of the garden, watching the rabbits. Our biggest harvest was tomatoes. But hornworms got about 1/3 of them.
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