How Carrots Became the new Junk Food

I wonder if perhaps the slump in sales is the cause of slimy carrots rather than the effect. It sounds like they were dumping carrots into the pipeline at a tremendous pace, and it sounds like every carrot farmer has added "baby carrot" tracts to their farms so they could push them out faster. What if there became a huge glut in the market for these overpriced carrots, and they ended up sitting on the shelves longer...baby carrots are freshly peeled and washed and still moist when packed, and the longer they stay wet in the refrigerator, the more slimy they become.

Slimy carrots are unappealing, thus they ended up staying on the shelves even longer and selling even slower.

I buy baby carrots, and they are not always slimy. It's about 50/50, in my experience, and it depends on where I buy them, as well. I travel full-time, so in the past year I've bought baby carrots in a couple dozen cities. It varies widely. Organic produce, including baby carrots, from Trader Joe's or Henry's or other natural foods type markets tend to be better, though not always. And produce purchased in small towns and towns far from big civilization (like in Alaska or the desert or mountains) is consistently of lower quality and not as fresh.

I don't know that "the pipeline/process" is to blame, though supply chain management might be. If they've got twice as many baby carrots as the market wants, and they let them sit on shelves for days or weeks before they hit the supermarket shelves, I can see that leading to a self-reinforcing problem.

> 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."

That's a good question. Debunking of the glycemic index as a dietary guideline isn't where most diet-focused scientists spend their time, since it's not where gains are to be found (everyone, except people pushing GI-oriented diets, knows that carrots are healthier than candy bars).

I came to the conclusion that looking at GI was a loony way to determine diet while researching Gary Taubes and the Good Calories, Bad Calories theory. Taubes is a proponent of Atkins-style diets and is anti-carbohydrate with religious fervor. He, unfortunately, hasn't been thoroughly debunked in any mainstream media that I'm aware of, even though damned near every scientist he quotes and references has come out to say that he's quoted them out of context and come to conclusions that they in no way endorse or agree with.

Quackwatch (though not entirely free from bias on all things) has covered the low-carb thing pretty well:

http://www.quackwatch.com/06ResearchProjects/lcd.html

Reason magazine had a good article when Taubes was first making a name for himself:

http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/big-fat-fake

The most damning portion (and most relevant to GI and low-carb diets) of which, I think, is on page three in the section titled "3,000 MIAS", which talks about the low percentage of Atkins (and other low-carb, low-GI) diet followers among the set of people who have lost 30+ lbs and kept it off.

It takes a tremendous amount of will-power to overlook the preponderance of evidence that Atkins and low-carb diets are not especially effective (though any diet that reduces your caloric intake will be effective), nor is there much science to back up the belief that high GI foods, in absence of obesity and other pre-diabetic factors, would lead to diabetes (which is another claim of low-GI proponents).

Any diet that claims that carrots are unhealthy is probably a diet you should throw out the window, because it flies in the face of a tremendous amount of science. That's not to say you should only eat carrots, but they certainly aren't going to make you fat, nor will they give you diabetes, and eating a bunch of Snickers bars every day very well could do both.

I agree. They generally don't taste as good. My carrot consumption is down since I don't often eat the big ones.

There's also way too many baby carrots per bag and most of them go bad within a few days (crusty and dry with white blemishes on the skin). I'm sure you could re-peel them since it's just the skin, but that's a lot of effort for the size.

Well, not exactly sure, but for apples (also triggers her allergies) organic doesn't help. All of these she had no reactions when she lived in France.

Guess we should try the organic carrots some time.