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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with you, I notice that I eat disproportionately few carrots than their taste would suggest (they are pretty delicious), and it's mostly because of the inconvenience of cleaning them and their relative unavailability. If I had a vending machine with carrots, I'd definitely choose them over the other snacks most of the time.

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It'd also be nice if when you do find carrots, they were packaged with something other than ranch dressing as a dip (e.g. carrots + hummus).

It's not necessary to go over the top with cleaning carrots. Just run them under some water and wipe off any excess dirt with some paper towel (or, as I've been guilty of doing, a t-shirt). Definitely don't peel them, plenty of nutrition there.

How much dirt isn't excess?

If it bothers your teeth beyond the point of enjoyment.

When I pick carrots from the garden, I just wipe dirt off with my hands and eat them. So delicious.

The longer I live in the "real world" the more cutting carrots while watching bad television has become a part of my routine. I can really eat them faster than I have the patience to shell them.

And if we want to make them junk food, all we have to do is up the sodium content to about 25% of that of a bag of chips, and kids will be gobbling them up just as if they were any other snack food. Of course, they won't be such a great thing anymore.

>all we have to do is up the sodium content to about 25% of that of a bag of chips, and kids will be gobbling them up just as if they were any other snack food

I thought the process was mince the food up, add salt, modified soya protein and flavour enhancers, some sunset yellow (or other diabolical food colouring) and then reshape the resulting mush into mini carrot-ettes.

Finish by frying in a vat of lard, dip in HCFS and then in sugar and crisp on the grill.

Voila, fast-food-ised carrots.

Is it really that inconvenient to clean a carrot? Just peel it and eat it. I can peel a carrot quicker than most people can even decide what to have at a vending machine.

if you have access to a knife

Don't you carry one with you?

You don't need to peel carrots, really. They are nice to eat just like they are!

How about all the pesticides though?

Carrots are roots. Even if the plant has been sprayed, you're not eating the part of the plant that got sprayed.

When I was young we used to pick carrots from the field and wash them in the irrigator before eating them, good times.

You're leaving out the bit where you find a knife and a cutting board, and then you wash the knife and the cutting board, and the bit where you throw away all the peel you cut off, and the bit where some of the peel winds up on the floor so you have to bend over and pick it up, and... wait, can't you just buy packaged prepeeled babby carrots anyway? They sell 'em at my local supermarket.

I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but I'll reply seriously anyway:

When I want a carrot I grab one out of the fridge, grab the peeler off of the counter, pull my compost box out from under the sink and peel it directly into the compost. Why would you need a cutting board?!

I agree. I'd love to have the option of getting carrots (if they were in decent condition) out of the vending machine at work.

Why don't you just keep a bag of carrots from the supermarket in a desk drawer instead? If put them in a paperbag instead of the plastic they usually come in (or else condensation will rot them), they'll easily keep for a week.

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