By now you will have learned
that baby carrots are a fiction.
Unlike other “true” baby vegetables—
baby spinach, for example,
baby lima beans, or baby squash —
which owe their size
and consensus cuteness
to being harvested before
reaching the age of
majority,
baby carrots are in fact
the industrially extracted
cores of fully grown but
unorthodox (in the strict sense
of the word) mature carrots,
meaning crooked or twisty,
forked or having multiple fleshy
appendages deemed unsightly
or upsetting to
the average shopper in whose
mind carrots
are an Aristotelian form
resembling the root Bugs Bunny
plucks from the ground in cartoons:
perfectly conical, free of dirt
and ready for
chomp chomp whatsupdoc.
Read baby carrots as
root-level reeducation:
unregenerate radicals
become round pegs.
