Baby Carrots Are A Symptom of our Wasteful Food System, Not A Solution

Most people don’t know that they are not even a real thing.

Let’s admit: the majority of people have no clue what they are eating and how it’s produced. That’s probably also the case for baby carrots. Not so much a thing here in Europe, in the US, 70% of all carrots sold are the infant version of what we know as “carrot” and make it the single most popular form of the root vegetable sold in the country.

Baby carrots have become a lunch box staple. Parents love them for their convenience and because they appear to be a healthy food option for their kids. The young ones love them because they’re cute and fun to eat and can be consumed in just one bite.

Are baby carrots real?

After all, they’re not like regular carrots. They’re perfectly shaped with rounded edges; they don’t have the same thick core; and, even peeled, they are bright orange.

So here we are, beaking it to you: Baby carrots are a big, fat lie. Strictly “baby” means immature, pulled from the ground before they reach full size. However, the baby carrots that we are talking about don’t grow in their cute, small & perfect shape as you can buy them packaged and ready to snack in your supermarket.

Back in the days, when baby carrots first came to live, they were made of whole, imperfect, craggy-looking carrots that were too ugly to be sold in the supermarket and a reaction to the tremendous waste of carrots that couldn’t be sold to consumers. Today, baby carrots are largely made of 100% normal and “pretty carrots which are sliced into smaller, 2 inch pieces, sculpted into rounded sticks, washed, sorted and packaged for our snacking convenience.

The invention of the baby carrot

It all began in the mid 80’s, where supermarkets, like today, expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and colour. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away.

One American farmer called Mike Yurosek in California, got tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day go to waste simply because they were too twisted, knobbly, bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed. Yurosek tried to be resourceful by thinking up ways on how to make wonky carrots that nobody wanted, more attractive. Knowing that many food processing plants cut up vegetables to sell them frozen in uniform sizes and shapes, he thought: why can’t I do the same with wonky carrots, just in fresh?

After some trial and error with a potato pealer and bean cutter, he had what we know know as a baby carrot: a 2 inch long carrot stick, rounded, peeled, ready to snack. The supermarket Yurosek was sending the samples to called the next day, saying ‘We only want those.’

The babies were an economic powerhouse. Back then, stores paid 10 cents a bag for whole carrots and sold them for 17 cents. They paid 50 cents for a 1-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for $1. By 1989, more markets were on board, and baby carrots were suddently trend.

Carrots started to be branded and customers were name-dropping their favourite baby carrot brand. On the downside, if they got a bad carrot, they would simply switch brand, which led to a race of finding the ideal breeding “recipe” for the perfect baby carrot.

Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between 6 and 7 inches. Now they’re typically 8 inches long, a “three-cut” that can make three 2-inch babies. And breeders were edging toward fields of even longer carrots to increase yield.

Things are getting out of hand, obviously.

How baby carrots are “made”

Watch how baby carrots are made in the vid below

• In the field, two-storey carrot harvesters use long metal prongs to open up the soil, while rubber belts grab the green tops and pull.
• They are trucked to the processing plant, where they are put in icy water to bring their temperature down to 3 °C (37 degrees Fahrenheit) to inhibit spoiling.
• They are sorted by thickness. Thin carrots continue on the processing line; the others will be used as whole carrots, juice, or cattle feed. An inspector looks for rocks, debris or malformed carrots that slip through.
• The carrots are shaped into 2-inch pieces by automated cutters. An optical sorter discards any piece that has green on it.
• The pieces are pumped through pipes to the peeling tanks. The peelers rotate, scraping the skin off the carrots. There are two stages: an initial rough peel and then a final “polishing.”
• To reduce microbial contamination, “baby-cut” carrots may be treated with small amounts of a weak chlorine solution. Those that are will be subsequently rinsed with potable water to remove the excess chlorine before being packaged. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the use of a weak chlorine solution as an antimicrobial treatment (similar to the chlorination of drinking water) is a current accepted practice in the processing for all fresh-cut ready-to-eat vegetables.
• The carrots are weighed and bagged by an automated scale and packager, then placed in cold storage until they are shipped.
• The white blush sometimes visible on the surface of “baby-cut” carrots is caused by dehydration of the cut surface. “Baby-cut” carrots are more prone to develop this because their entire surface area is a cut surface. Low-temperature, high-humidity storage can minimize the white appearance.

Feeling a little overwhelmed?

Yep, us too. While now many baby carrot enthusiasts claim that its invention has turned the carrot industry into a much more efficient and much less wasteful endeavor, they are disregarding the mechanism behind why baby carrots had to be invented in the first place, and that is the horrific waste resulting from absurd beauty standards.

In our view, it is perverted that we have to come up with unnatural inventions like “baby carrots” just to cover up the fact that our food system is obsolete, outdated and cruel if it can let go so much perfect food go to waste.

You can decide what world you want to live in: one that serves baby carrots, or one that doesn`t?