Baby Carrots

You know, for some time now, we as a family have been eating more healthfully. It goes without saying that I spend lots more time now in the produce section. Trying to market nutritional snacks like celery and carrots and the like to kids who find cheetos and doritos and (and all those other OH!s) more appealing is a difficult task. Not to mention the constant chocolate calling! The one snack we all agree on, however, is the baby carrot. Baby carrots are cute and small and well, have baby in their name, so the kids will eat them. It got me thinking, just where did all these baby carrots come from?

When I was a kid, my mom bought grown-up carrots, you know, with the green on the top. I don't remember baby carrots from my childhood, do you? Know why? Cause back then, carrots were just carrots, one size, thank you very much.

So when did carrots have babies? And are they baby carrots or midget carrots? Ones too small to make the cut? I know it's silly, but this is how my brain works, so I decided to do a little digging. (Get it? Digging, carrots, hee hee) Turns out, there's really no such thing as a baby carrot. A baby carrot, picked before it's dreaded teenage years...doesn't exist. How DID these babies happen then? A clever farmer realized that he was constantly weeding out ugly, stumpy, bent-out-of-shape carrots, not pretty enough to sell, and feeding too many carrots to his livestock made for orange animals. In an attempt to reduce waste he invented a form of ugly carrot-recycling. Why not, he thought, cut these unsellable carrots into bite-sized pieces, peeled and all, and make them more appetizing? At first he used a potato peeler, but with no success. He then bought a green bean cutter from a going-out-of-business bean business, and voila! The perfect fun-size baby carrot was born!

Out of not wanting to create waste, this farmer gave birth to a whole new generation of carrots. AND, what's more, baby carrots are more expensive than regular, full-sized carrots. People actually pay more for the peeled, whittled-down, bent-up, ugly carrots...now turned into something cute and cuddly. The farmer suddenly had a gold mine in his new baby carrots. Hmmm...I'm sensing a life-lesson in there somewhere, arent' you?

Now, everyone knows that I'm not the tallest person, so stories about small things turning into big things...well, they tickle me. But this story goes deeper than just a "size-matters" joke. Not all of us are "market-ready," so to speak. We may be lumpy and bumpy, bent out of shape, or just not big enough to be appealing. We may not fit the mold of how a proper "carrot" should look. But with some creative tweaking and trimming and peeling, we all have the potential to be something sweeter, more valuable. Underneath the bumpy surface could lie treasure, waiting to be found. Just like those baby carrots.