Carrot Facts

CARROT FACTS

1. The carrot (Daucus carota sativus), is a biennial plant which is usually grown for it's edible tap root which is eaten at the end of the first season.
2. It is a domesticated form of the wild carrot, native to Europe and southwestern Asia, thought to originate in Afghanistan.
3. Carrots can be eaten raw, cooked or made into juice.
4. The Anglo-Saxons included carrots as an ingredient in a medicinal drink against the devil and insanity.
5. Carrots have the highest content of beta carotene (vitamin A) of all vegetables.
6. The Wild Carrot is called Queen Anne's Lace.
7. The Americans know the wild carrot as Queen Anne's Lace, wild carrot, rattlesnake weed & American carrot.
8. The Worlds Longest Carrot recorded in 2007 was 5.839 metres (19 feet 1 7/8 inches)
9. The Worlds  Heaviest Carrot recorded in 1998 was 18.985 lb (8.61kg) (single root mass)
10. There is a carrot pie flavour jelly bean!
11. Carrots were first grown as a medicine not a food.
12. The average person will consume 10,866 carrots in a lifetime.
13. The Ancient Greeks called carrots "Karoto"
14. Carrots flowers are also called Birds nest, Bees nest and the Devils Plague
15. Carrots produce more distilled spirit than potatoes.
16. Tobacconists in France used to put a carrot in their bins to keep their tobacco from drying out.
17. The Japanese word for carrot is "ninjin"!
18. In early Celtic literature, the carrot is referred to as the "Honey Underground"!
19. The classic Bugs Bunny carrot is the "Danvers" type.
20. It's a myth that Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots - he simply did not like them.
21. Wild rabbits do not eat carrots – you have been watching too much Bugs Bunny !
22. Carrots are not always orange and can also be found in purple, white, red or yellow.
23. Carrots were the first vegetable to be canned commercially.
24. The Greek foot soldiers who hid in the Trojan Horse were said to have consumed ample quantities of raw carrots to inactivate their bowels.
25. The Ancient Greeks called the plant Philtron or Bird's Nest.
26. Gentlemen in Teheran in the 1870's took carrots stewed in sugar as an aphrodisiac to increase the quality and quantity of sperm!
27. In Suffolk, Carrots were formerly given as a specific for preserving and restoring the wind of horses.
28. Fuel for Cars? Scientists now believe that bio fuels will be the answer to our energy needs when the oil runs out. One such fuel, perhaps within 10 years, will be carrots - it would take approximately 6000 carrots to drive one mile.
29. The carrot belongs to the family Umbelliferae.
30. The cultivated variety is classified as Daucus carota, variety sativa.
31. You get between 175,000 and 400,000 seeds in a pound - a teaspoon can hold approximately 2000!
32. The carrot is a member of the parsley family including species such as celery, parsnip, fennel, dill and coriander.
33. Holtville, California dubs itself "The Carrot Capital of the World." with an Annual Festival, now in its 60th year.
34. Researchers at the USDA found that study participants who consumed 2 carrots a day were able to lower their cholesterol levels about 20 percent due to a soluble fibre called calcium pectate.
35. You get 10 mg of Vitamin A from 20 average carrots.
36. There is as much calcium in 9 carrots as there is in a glass (250ml) of whole milk.
37. China produces 274,900,000 tons of carrots per year.
38. Three Carrots give you enough energy to walk three miles.
39. One pound of carrots will make approximately six to eight ounces of carrot juice.
40. A teaspoon holds almost 2000 carrot seeds.
41. Carrot is a symbolic of fecundity (look it up).
42. The Flaming Carrot was a mysterious and demented comic book superhero.
43. The British developed high-carotene carrots during World War II in order to enhance the night vision of their pilots (via massive consumption).

CARROT QUOTATIONS

Mae West "I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond,"

Fran Lebowitz in Metropolitan Life (1978) "Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter."

Will Rogers (1879-1935) "Some guy invented Vitamin A out of a carrot. I'll bet he can't invent a good meal out of one."

Will Rogers (again) "An onion can make people cry but there has never been a vegetable to make people laugh"

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian author, playwright. "You ask What is life? That is the same as asking, What is a carrot; A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.

J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) “But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.”

John Robinson Jeffers (1187-1962) "Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice."

Pliny the Elder, a Roman Historian and scientist said:"There is one kind of wild pastinaca which grows spontaneously; by the Greeks it is known as staphylinos. Another kind is grown either from the root transplanted or else from seed, the ground being dug to a very considerable depth for the purpose. It begins to be fit for eating at the end of the year, but it is still better at the end of two; even then, however, it preserves its strong pungent flavour, which it is found impossible to get rid of." - It was the Carrot.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) "The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution."

Nicholos Culpeper (1653) said of carrots that "Wild carrots belong to Mercury, and expel wind and remove stitches in the side, promote the flow of urine and women's courses, and break and expel the stone; the seed has the same effect and is good for dropsy, and those whose bowels are swollen with wind: It cures colic, stone, and rising of the mother; being taken in wine or boiled in wine and taken, it helpeth conception. The leaves being applied with honey to running sores or ulcers cleanse them; I suppose the seeds of them perform this better than the roots: and though Galen recommended garden carrots highly to expel wind, yet they breed it first, and we may thank nature for expelling it, not they; for the seeds of them expel wind and so mend what the root marreth."

Greek Physician Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-c. 90) wrote "Ye root ye thickness of a finger, a span long, sweet-smelling, edible being sodden [boiled]. Of this ye seed being drank...and it is good for ye [painful discharge of urine] in potions, and for ye bitings and strokes of venomous beasts; they say also, that they which take it before hand shall take no wrong of wilde beasts. It co-operates also to conception, and it also being [diuretic], both provoketh [poison], and being applied; but the leaves being beaten small with honey, and laid on, doth cleanse rapidly spreading destructive ulceration of soft tissues."

Evans and Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV:1). -

"Remember, William," says Sir Hugh Evans, "Focative is Caret," "and that" replies Mrs. Quickly, "is a good root."

Shakespeare - Midsummer Nights Dream:

"The man in the moon drinks claret,
But he is a dull Jack-a-dandy;
Would he know a sheep's head from a Carrot
He should learn to drink cider and brandy."
Song of Mad Tom in _Midsummer Night's Dream.

Richard Gardiner in Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens (1599) "Sowe Carrets in your Gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing."

Irena Chalmers in "The Great Food Almanac". Eating a carrot a day is "like signing a life insurance policy"

Old Yiddish saying "Only in dreams are carrots as big as bears."

Irish Proverb  "Never bolt your door with a boiled carrot."

An old Polish saying " If your husband is old and weak you must have him to drink the juice from two big carrots and one firm celery."

Old proverb How do you lead a horse to water? With lots of carrots.

John Stolarczyk (1950-?) "Remember a carrot is for life not just for Christmas"; "Gardeners never die then simply throw in the trowel"; "They are not all locked up yet".

Shel Silverstein What did the carrot say to the wheat? Lettuce rest, I'm feeling beet.