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How Carrots Became the new Junk Food
- api 16y agohttp://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=xtreme_bullshit http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=xtreme_bulls...
- s00pcan 16y agoI can't remember the last time Maddox was relevant.
- Joeboy 16y agoWonder why that story is dated April 1, 2011 (print version only)
- jerf 16y agoIf 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.
- mberning 16y agoIt 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.
- Joeboy 16y ago> If you're implying this may be an extended joke No, just intrigued by the article being apparently from the future.
- shaggyfrog 16y agoHere's another article from USA Today, on the same subject, from September 3, 2010. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-08-29-baby-carrots-marketing_N.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-08-29-bab...
- Joeboy 16y agoSeptember 3 2010 is less perplexing as it's in the past.
- mashmac2 16y agoPrint 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.
- mberning 16y agoI 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.
- whakojacko 16y agoReally? I love raw carrots and I know I'm not alone.
- smokinn 16y agoI 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.
- kragen 16y ago> 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.
- oihujyfgthyjuik 16y agoWhen 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
- 16y ago
- r00fus 16y agoMy 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?
- enjo 16y agoOut 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?
- Splines 16y agoI 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.
- electromagnetic 16y agoFYI Mars bars help control the salivation.
- Splines 16y agoWell, I'm allergic to those too, so it isn't much help ;)
- karlmdavis 16y agoI'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...
- r00fus 16y ago
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoI know why baby carrot sales flatlined. Every bag I buy is slimy. Something changed in the pipeline/process and now they are disgusting.
- noodle 16y agofor me, it was more simple. baby carrots are crazy expensive compared to normal carrots. i decided i was perfectly fine eating normal carrots instead.
- gallamine 16y agoIf 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."
- noodle 16y agoi did, just adding/validating a data relavent data point.
- nooneelse 16y agoIndeed, 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.
- streeter 16y agoI 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- alexk7 16y ago4g of sugar out of a 85g serving is not 57%. Where did you get those numbers?
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI think he means 57% of the calories come from sugars. But it sounds way scarier to say they are 57% sugar.
- zasz 16y agoCarrots don't cause the same insulin spike that candy bars do. Refined and processed sugars hit your bloodstream much more quickly than unprocessed foods. Carrots also don't taste as good as a chocolate bar, so it would still be an epic sacrifice.
- kragen 16y agoYou are mistaken. The technical term for "hit your bloodstream much more quickly than" is "has a higher glycemic index than". Carrots and chocolate bars both supposedly have the same glycemic index, 49: http://www.carbs-information.com/glycemic-index-food-chart.htm http://www.carbs-information.com/glycemic-index-food-chart.h... while Snickers bars are down at 41. The reason carrots don't cause the same insulin spike is not that they don't hit your bloodstream as quickly, or any bullshit about refinement and processing. It's that they're mostly made of water and indigestible cellulose, so the total amount of sugar involved is much lower.
- zasz 16y agoHm, good point. Kind of a shame that I got so many more upvotes than you. The OP's point about carrots being as good as junk food is still bullshit, though.
- oihujyfgthyjuik 16y ago
- mikecarlucci 16y agoMissed the best reason carrots are like junk food: they're sweet.
- huherto 16y agoBut they have a lot of fiber which is supposed to be the antidote for sweet.
- endtime 16y agoFiber 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".
- huherto 16y agoI remember that assertion from the "bitter truth" videos. But I don't exactly understand why he says so.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gwern 16y ago> 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."
- niravshah 16y agoWhy is April 1st coming early this year (see date of article)
- jamesgeck0 16y agoFor the curious, the television ads are on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/user/BunchOfCarrotFarmers#p/c/823F55B5CB6E31CD http://www.youtube.com/user/BunchOfCarrotFarmers#p/c/823F55B...
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago> 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.
- sorbits 16y ago“most of the goodness is actually in, or just below the skin” from http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/nutrition.html 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.