Vegetables and How I Cook Them: Carrots

Farming taught me how much freaking work goes into food production, and that wasting food is truly a waste—of money, time, and resources. Take for example mirepoix, the carrot, celery, onion foundational trinity of classic cooking. Post-farming, I realized that it takes a minimum of 75 days to grow a carrot—80 days for celery; 108 days for onions—and that’s best-case scenario. Not to mention that those day counts don’t include the labor hours to start, transplant, weed, cultivate, clean, and store the crops. I suddenly knew the cost of these foods, not only to our customers but to ourselves.