SQJ Taipei

Jen wrote about baby carrots the other day…

I share her affinity for baby carrots and I’m very glad to learn of the price drop at Costco.

I’ll probably grab some occasionally, but we are pretty used to eating regular old carrots… peeled and chopped up into stix… or juiced… YUM!

The person who wrote the article below has some cool info on the baby carrot… and why she doesn’t eat them any more. They are tasteless little chunks.

Baby carrots - The frugal idea thats isnt | Wise Bread

The story of the baby carrot is an interesting study in contrasts. The baby carrot is the brain child of Mike Yurosek, a Californian farmer who was weary of throwing away tons of carrots every year because they wouldn’t sell. Anyone who has ever grown carrots in their garden knows that carrots don’t always grow in perfect shapes. Some are bumpy and lumpy and ugly, and even if they taste wonderful, they won’t sell in a supermarket if they don’t fit that ideal carrot shape.

That bugged Yurosek. And apparently, feeding tons and tons of ugly carrots to livestock wasn’t the answer.

Culls are carrots that are too twisted, knobby, bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed. And there are only so many discarded carrots you can feed to a pig or a steer, says Yurosek, now 82 and retired. “After that, their fat turns orange,” he says.

I believe this. As someone who once went on a baby carrot binge and subsequently turned a light shade of orange, I can attest that beta carotene is a strange substance indeed.

In 1986, Yurosek came up with the idea of taking the ugly carrots and cutting them into small pieces of more or less uniform appearance.

First he had to cut the culls into something small enough to make use of their straight parts. “The first batch we did, we did in a potato peeler and cut them by hand,” Yurosek says. Then he found a frozen-food company that was going out of business and bought an industrial green-bean cutter, which just happened to cut things into 2-inch pieces. Thus was born the standard size for a baby carrot.

Next, Yurosek sent one of his workers to a packing plant and loaded the cut-up carrots into an industrial potato peeler to take off the peel and smooth down the edges. What he ended up with was a little rough but still recognizable as the baby carrot of today.