Carrots

Appears in
A Canon of Vegetables

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2007

  • About

I took it as a sign of evolutionary progress when my sons both ate carrots without hesitation, with enthusiasm in fact, from infancy. Carrots, especially cooked carrots, had repelled me as a child, mushy orange things lurking in stews. I would push them to the side of my plate, and this was tolerated, since carrots were the only common food I actively disliked. Had I lived a few centuries earlier, Daucus carota would not have plagued me.

In antiquity, the carrot as we know it—an orange root vegetable with a high sugar content—did not exist.