How Carrots Became the new Junk Food | Hacker News Reader

How Carrots Became the new Junk Food

fastcompany.com

194 pointshnal94381 comments

> AT COCA-COLA, Dunn was obsessed with per capita consumption. "Per capita was my mantra," he says. But as he neared the end of his time there, he began to feel conflicted. It was still his job to sell more Coke. But people were drinking a lot of Coke. He talked to his father about it. "If you've got a per capita of three, four, five" -- 500 Cokes a year -- "that's fine. But there are places in the United States where you have per capitas of 1,000. I can't get my head around somebody drinking 1,000 Cokes a year," Dunn says. "This was before obesity had become as prevalent. But it was pretty clear that's where the world was going. And certainly sugar soft drinks had a direct role in that."

Reminds me of a David Foster Wallace aside:

> "On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it's become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job."

I know why baby carrot sales flatlined. Every bag I buy is slimy. Something changed in the pipeline/process and now they are disgusting.

for me, it was more simple. baby carrots are crazy expensive compared to normal carrots. i decided i was perfectly fine eating normal carrots instead.

If you RTFA you'll see:

"People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled."

i did, just adding/validating a data relavent data point.

Indeed, my time while waiting on some cooking process is effectively free to me [I'm already spending it a) cooking and b) listening to a podcast]. So I work things like peeling and cleaning carrots into that time.

I stopped buying baby carrots when I found out that they are just big carrots cut down. They aren't picked early or anything. Thus, a lot of waste is created to make baby carrots.

According to the article, baby carrots were invented to reduce waste. Carrots grow into all sorts of shapes and sizes, but supermarkets only buy a narrow range; the rejects get used for animal feed, or factory food. With baby carrots, more of the carrot gets eaten by humans—and presumably the stuff that's cut off is still sold the way the rejects used to be.

Shaved carrots.

Single, dual, multi-blade or electric? Seriously, do you go for the clean contoured shave or multifaceted polygonal surfacing? Is a shave effectively different from peeling?

Try growing some carrots of your own. Way cheaper than buying them, gives you a sense of pride in your own work, really easy to grow, basically just requires sprinkling seeds in the spring and pulling them out of the ground and washing them off when they get big enough.

I wonder if perhaps the slump in sales is the cause of slimy carrots rather than the effect. It sounds like they were dumping carrots into the pipeline at a tremendous pace, and it sounds like every carrot farmer has added "baby carrot" tracts to their farms so they could push them out faster. What if there became a huge glut in the market for these overpriced carrots, and they ended up sitting on the shelves longer...baby carrots are freshly peeled and washed and still moist when packed, and the longer they stay wet in the refrigerator, the more slimy they become.

Slimy carrots are unappealing, thus they ended up staying on the shelves even longer and selling even slower.

I buy baby carrots, and they are not always slimy. It's about 50/50, in my experience, and it depends on where I buy them, as well. I travel full-time, so in the past year I've bought baby carrots in a couple dozen cities. It varies widely. Organic produce, including baby carrots, from Trader Joe's or Henry's or other natural foods type markets tend to be better, though not always. And produce purchased in small towns and towns far from big civilization (like in Alaska or the desert or mountains) is consistently of lower quality and not as fresh.

I don't know that "the pipeline/process" is to blame, though supply chain management might be. If they've got twice as many baby carrots as the market wants, and they let them sit on shelves for days or weeks before they hit the supermarket shelves, I can see that leading to a self-reinforcing problem.

It's (slightly) more work, but a quick rinse under the tap fixes that.

You know its a bacterial film you're trying to wash off, right? Short of alcohol or some antiseptic, its still completely disgusting.

My wife won't eat carrots because they make her allergic (cooked ones are fine)... she only gets these reactions since moving here to the US from France.

Since this is a duopoly from the same region (Central CA), perhaps the dropoff in the past few years is due to the carrot quality?

Out of curiosity: I have a friend who had the same allergy... she switched to purely organic carrots and it went away. Does it work the same way with your wife?

I get allergies to them too (plus apples, bananas, strawberries, and a bunch of other fruit). The weird thing is that I could eat all of these things probably up until my early 20s (late 1990s), and now all I can do is stare and salivate.

FYI Mars bars help control the salivation.

Well, I'm allergic to those too, so it isn't much help ;)

I've got the same thing myself: allergic to uncooked carrots and most fruits (e.g. pears, cantaloupes). Started when I was a teenager-- actually figured out what was going on for the first time eating a bag of baby carrots. I've tried organic pears and didn't notice any of the usual burning/itching. Still afraid to start eating them on a regular basis, though...

Well, not exactly sure, but for apples (also triggers her allergies) organic doesn't help. All of these she had no reactions when she lived in France.

Guess we should try the organic carrots some time.

Rather than thinking organic/inorganic, why not try different varieties of carrots? If you can't find a retailer that sells named varieties, try growing your own because seeds are always sold with the name. There's all sorts of types and colours:

http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/today.html

Regarding carrot quality, both Bolthouse and Grimway Farms have been growing a different type of carrot specifically for the baby carrot products.

A family friend is an exec at one of the above companies and he mentioned that the taste of the baby carrots are indeed more bland than the 'regular' carrots. I just conducted a highly scientific experiment and tasted one of each at lunch - my conclusion: he is correct :)

I agree. They generally don't taste as good. My carrot consumption is down since I don't often eat the big ones.

There's also way too many baby carrots per bag and most of them go bad within a few days (crusty and dry with white blemishes on the skin). I'm sure you could re-peel them since it's just the skin, but that's a lot of effort for the size.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=xtreme_bulls...

I can't remember the last time Maddox was relevant.

Missed the best reason carrots are like junk food: they're sweet.

But they have a lot of fiber which is supposed to be the antidote for sweet.

Fiber slows digestion, which (according to my limited understanding) mitigates the blood insulin spike which is the main fault of fructose - but I wouldn't really call that mitigation an "antidote".

I remember that assertion from the "bitter truth" videos. But I don't exactly understand why he says so.

For the curious, the television ads are on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BunchOfCarrotFarmers#p/c/823F55B...

Wonder why that story is dated April 1, 2011 (print version only)

If you're implying this may be an extended joke, I'm pretty sure it isn't. I've seen other stories about this in the past couple of months that have nothing to do with April 1. I'm not in any of the test markets though, so I can't vouch that I've seen these personally.

It is not. I live in one of the test markets and the commercials run constantly. One of the commercials features an woman shooting a baby carrot mini-gun at a man while he jumps off a cliff.

> If you're implying this may be an extended joke

No, just intrigued by the article being apparently from the future.

Magazines are almost always released before the cover dates; some just transferred that practice to the web. Where I think it is really annoying.

Only EXTREME magazines do this.

Here's another article from USA Today, on the same subject, from September 3, 2010.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-08-29-bab...

September 3 2010 is less perplexing as it's in the past.

Print magazines are often post-dated. This is just from the April 1 edition of Fast Company.

The quest to have the freshest, newest news brings us print news from the future, with article deadlines (for the authors) from last week.

> a white-coated staff has been experimenting with a future phase of the campaign: flavors.

And that's the point at which baby carrots really do become junk food.

“most of the goodness is actually in, or just below the skin” from http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/nutrition.html

Never seen Baby Carrots, but if they are “carved” from regular carrots, it sounds like they already lost some of their nutritional value.

Why is April 1st coming early this year (see date of article)

I see 'extreme' commercials for baby carrots all the time on local television. They can put all the marketing they want behind baby carrots, there is still one big problem: raw carrots taste like shit. I'd honestly rather go hungry than eat raw carrots, and no amount of cool marketing is going to change that.

Really? I love raw carrots and I know I'm not alone.

I love raw carrots as well but JoeAltmaier pinpointed the reason I don't buy baby carrots anymore: they're slimy.

I have no idea why but a couple of years back the carrots started getting slimy and it got progressively worse.

Now, instead of eating a bunch of baby carrots as a snack I just take a whole carrot and cut it into quarters lengthwise and eat that.

> I have no idea why but a couple of years back the carrots started getting slimy and it got progressively worse.

This reminds me:

The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten.

When they were a luxury food the baby carrots were actually 'young' carrots.

Now they are popular they are just sections of whole carrots put through a press to cut and shape them. They are basically carrot 'french fries' thats why the end up slimy

You're definitely not. Carrots are awesome food to eat while working because they don't leave any residue on your fingers.

With a vinaigrette they are ten times better.

With cream cheese frosting in a cake, they are irresistible.

I love them, too, thanks largely to Bugs Bunny. A clip of Bugs chomping a carrot from one of his old cartoons has an almost Pavlovian effect on me.

The inner core is very sweet, I have always looked at them as a sweet snack. Plus as a child I was told they would help me see in the dark better which I thought was a kind of super power.

When I was younger my Dad actually OD'd on carrots, he ate so many that his skin went orange.

I've always loved the taste of raw carrots, although honestly "baby carrots" tend to be some of the most bland and tasteless of carrots. :-(

You realize baby carrots are cut from the regular carrots?

Kind of. They're cut down from carrots that are made to grow as long, thin and quickly as possibly. Not exactly from a carrot that you'd find in your garden. That's not to mention the peeling and washing they go through, which I can't imagine it not changing the taste.

If your point is that "baby carrots" taste like regular carrots, then I have my doubts that you've ever tasted a good carrot.

They are cut from regular carrots, but as the story indicates, the farms mostly responsible for baby carrots changed their growing techniques to make carrots skinny and as long as possible. Perhaps the change in growing technique has also effected the flavor.

I had thought of the change in growing technique as being the cause, but you may be correct. I assumed it had something to do with the processing, shipping and storage times, preservatives, etc.

Try some different brands. I realize the article says there are basically only two big baby carrot producers, but the brand at Safeway is noticeably worse than others, IME.

Make sure you're eating fresh carrots. Old dried out ones are, in fact, awful.

Oh, and make sure to swallow. As a kid I hated carrots because I'd chew, suck the juicy life out of the mash, and chew some more, and suddenly the carrot mash would become dry and impossible to swallow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com