Do your part

to stave off the fall of our empire by examining and rejecting the so-called baby carrot.

What is this food?

Is it really a food?

I have at times fallen prey to the lure of the baby carrot, fantasizing for a brief delusional moment about how easy it will be to come home and rip open the package and throw them on the table, or for my kids to grab a handful and stuff them in their lunches. In those moments of weakness, I forgot that someone would actually have to eat them. As I was peeling and carrot-sticking some beautiful orange carrots tonight for the kids I thought, really, this is not the same food as the baby carrot at all, with its unappealing dry patina, its woody texture, its un-carrotlike flavor. How hard is it to peel and cut a carrot? I thought. I don't know if the baby carrot is actually different variety of carrot altogether, or if they just salvage pieces of old woody carrots they were going to feed to their hogs and make them into little bullet shaped carrots.

And really, do we need them in individually sized packages?

How hard is it to put your carrots into a container?

The advent of the baby carrot, which led to the even more insidious individually packaged baby carrot, is the ultimate sign, the canary in the coal mine if you will, of a culture in decline. Help me resist this decline by boycotting this little orange Trojan horse.

Furthermore, let me exhort you to choose loose carrots over pre-packaged bulk carrots. It's true, they cost more, but they taste more than twice as good as their woody old ancestors in the large packages (harvested in 2005), and I always end up wasting more bulk carrots because they can be bitter, tough and misshapen. You can even save plastic by letting your loose carrots roam free in the cart and in your shopping bag. You will be washing and peeling them, after all.

Carrots are a delicious and precious food that can sustain the most humble of cuisines through hard times. Let us give them their due, and forsake their predators the baby carrots in both bulk and individually-sized packages.

p.s.--Look for a coming post entitled "The Pre-Packaged Sliced Apple."