| On the lighter side .... This comes amid a debate in Britain about the ubiquity of supermarkets. |
Pre-sorted for size, the carrot is launched into the air under the eye of a computer-controlled video camera, which films each carrot. In less than a millisecond, the computer compares it with a picture of the perfect carrot stored on its hard drive. Each carrot that fails to match up in terms of shape, bend, splits or blemishes is identified while still airborne and nudged off course by a tiny jet of air, landing in a âbulk holding areaâ, rejected by man, machine and a culture of vegetable conformity. This week the Prince of Wales went public in praise of âwibbly-wobblyâ carrots, by which he seemed to mean odd-sized, misshapen ones. Showing off a large tray of them on his farm in Gloucestershire, he lamented the fact that all would fail to meet supermarketsâ cosmetic standards and urged the carrot-buying public to embrace carrot diversity.
His remarks have struck a chord. The Soil Association, of which he is patron, said it was âdelightedâ. Anthony Worrall Thompson, the celebrity chef and longstanding champion of vegetables with character, will welcome his new ally.
Earlier this month the National Trust announced a national hunt for Britainâs ugliest vegetable, and yesterday the British Nutrition Foundation confirmed that knobbly carrots are every bit as nutritious as ânormalâ ones.
But how to get your hands on them if you lack your own organic farm? Not easily. Behind our mania for catwalk-ready produce lies a bleak tale of discrimination and waste. The secret life of the knobbly carrot is harsh.
It starts with the growerâs choice of seed â 75 per cent of the carrots grown in Britain are of the Nairobi variety, chosen largely for length, straightness, ease of washing and âbecause it travels and stores wellâ, according to the Soil Association.
Much of the remaining 25 per cent are Imperators, which come out of the ground large but are mechanically cut and peeled to produce what look like baby carrots for snacks and lunchboxes.
Andrew Burgess, a grower in East Anglia grower, admitted that âif flavour was the number one criterion we could select different varietiesâ, but he insisted that consumers were ultimately the ones who chose by look.
Short, cartoonish Chantenays do reach supermarkets, along with delicate Yukons and Napolis (usually in bunches, still attached to their stalks). But all are hard to grow and too fragile for the £250,000 harvesters that dig up most of Britainâs carrots at up to 60 tons per hour. They are picked by hand and priced accordingly.
Six per cent of carrots never get fatter than a pencil or closer to the market than the growerâs âpreliminary grading tableâ, a belt of steel rollers. They fall through the gaps and are ploughed back into the ground.
A further five per cent â 50,000 tonnes a year â are rejected at the same stage as being too fat at over 45mm (the thickness of a decent leek). These are destined to be shredded for salads and soups, cut into batons for dipping, mulched for animal feed or left in their oversize splendour to be eaten whole by horses. Some knobbly carrots may survive the preliminary grading but their remaining time intact is short.
Supermarkets have aesthetic standards for organic as well as â conventionalâ carrots, so both types undergo the same screening at the packing plant. First, they are washed by being floated out of trucks and into revolving barrels equipped with soft internal brushes. âItâs all about being gentle,â says Mr Burgess, who operates two packing plants. âTheyâre not as sturdy as you think, carrots.â
They are then cooled in water from the average of 20C at which they emerge from the soil to the 3C at which, if lucky, they will be sold.
Then comes the ordeal of optical grading. The ideal carrot against which computers judge those flying past it is based on EU marketing standards, which divide those worthy of sale to humans into two classes. Only class one carrots reach supermarkets whole, and no knobbly carrots make that grade.
The customerâs best hope of finding a truly knobbly carrot lies in the booming organic box business. Sales of boxes of vegetables delivered weekly to homes soared by 20 per cent last year. But by far the most likely fate of a truly knobbly carrot remains the processing plant â or the skip.
Prêt à Manger welcomes knobbly carrots and buys 17 tons of them a year for its carrot cake alone.
The Knobbly Carrot Company, based in Lampeter, Wales, is even more enthusiastic. âThe knobblier the better,â a spokesman said. But does it sell them? No. It is a soup and salad company.
Japanese farmers grow melons in square glass cases. Each melon takes on square fridge-friendly dimensions and sells for triple the price, up to £50. In a marketing ploy by the Morrisons supermarket chain, growers place a heart-shaped sticker on apples as they ripen, leaving a perfect heart on the skin of each fruit. At a fair in Illinois last summer, a call for unusually formed vegetables yielded a Mickey Mouse-shaped potato, a cucumber that described a figure of eight and an aubergine said to resemble Richard Nixon. This summer Tesco began selling flat peaches. In 1994 Brussels arrived at standards for bananas that included curvature and quality, leading to unfounded rumours that straight bananas were to be imposed on consumers. Scientists did produce straight bananas in the 1960s. They were not liked.