Carrots

Carrots are more highly bred than our royal family. Through 500 years of intensive selection, the Dutch have selected out all the freaks so that what we have left are fast-growing, uniform, bland-tasting roots with ‘robust handling characteristics’, meaning that you can drop them out of an aeroplane without them breaking – crucial for mechanical harvesting, grading, washing and packing. I once visited a carrot variety trial and throughout the day I never saw anyone taste a carrot or even mention flavour. As a nation we’ve been trained to expect blandly uniform carrots – at best a bit watery, at worst rather bitter – and to pay very little for them; the Nairobi variety accounts for over half the market even though it comes near the bottom in every taste trial. Many of the most flavourful varieties we used to plant at Riverford are no longer available. (If you are a gardener try Autumn King; they grow huge, are brittle and tend to crack but taste great.)