wooliebear:

Ever wonder where baby carrots come from?

…there’s a twist to this great beta-carotene success story: Baby carrots aren’t babies at all. They’re grown-up carrots cut into 2-inch sections, pumped through water-filled pipes into whirling cement-mixer-size peelers and whittled down to the niblets Americans know, love and scarf down by the bagful.

“I was shocked when I first discovered that,” says Jeanne Ambrose, a food and entertainment editor at Better Homes and Gardens. “I’d wondered how they got them all so perfectly matched to grow all the same shape and size.”

The miniatures — the brainchild of a California farmer tired of discarding imperfect vegetables — have taken a steadily larger market share and now make up a third of sales of fresh carrots, says Philipp Simon, a plant breeder and geneticist who directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s vegetable breeding program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read more here.

I wonder if they still use imperfect carrots, or if they’re griding down perfect veggies now.