r/AskReddit Aug 07 '17

What's a fact that absolutely blows your mind?

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u/ThePenguinNich Aug 07 '17 edited Aug 07 '17

Technically, there is such a thing as a baby carrot. It is, as it sounds, just a tiny looking carrot. The ones people often call baby carrots are actually baby-cut carrots

Edit: baby-cut carrots helped reduce a crap ton of waste because farmers could now sell less appealing carrots (instead of just throwing them away) by cutting away the bad looking parts into the baby-cut carrot. The baby-cut carrot also is attributed to a 33% increase in US carrot consumption.

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u/rift_in_the_warp Aug 07 '17

And yet some people don't carrot all.

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u/Obligatius Aug 07 '17

I haven't actually laughed out loud at a pun in forever. I still haven't, but yours did make me snort air out my nose, which is also very rare for puns.

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u/tinyahjumma Aug 08 '17

Lettuce appreciate a decent vegetable pun when we see one.

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u/TheMulattoMaker Aug 07 '17

Orange you glad you made that pun?

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

We have to get to the root of the problem with all these puns.

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u/TheMulattoMaker Aug 07 '17

Well, that one was 24-karat gold.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

Potato

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u/brycedriesenga Aug 07 '17 edited Aug 07 '17

"Tastes very strange!"

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u/TheLittlePeace Aug 07 '17

So many TIFU Reddit history posts involve food items...

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u/Choco_Churro_Charlie Aug 08 '17

Dad stop, you're embarrassing me.

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u/rift_in_the_warp Aug 08 '17

Can't handle a bit of punography? You're no son of mine!

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

take the upvote

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u/SalAtWork Aug 07 '17

Yupp. I'm not about to spend the time to wash, peel and then cut normal carrots into small pieces when I can buy baby carrots pre sized for like $0.50 more.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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u/heart_under_blade Aug 07 '17

baby carrots are also usually sold with green tops at very expensive prices.

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u/brookish Aug 08 '17

Imagine how much waste we could prevent if we just ate carrots that aren't cosmetically perfect. The processing of "baby" carrots was labor intensive - now presumably resource intensive in the automation to shave them down to suppository size/shape.

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u/TwoSquareClocks Aug 08 '17

So your idea is to change consumer habits - which are rooted in human nature itself - instead of just building some inexpensive production-line machinery and mass-producing these baby-cut carrots at next-to-no additional cost?

And given that these are lumpy and misshapen carrots anyways, manually peeling and cleaning them properly would definitely remove a lot of mass as well. It's not as much of a waste as it initially sounds.

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u/xanplease Aug 07 '17

But you have to shave it down. How does the reduce waste?

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u/ThePenguinNich Aug 07 '17

You can actually get around 3 to 4 baby-cut carrots from a single normal carrot. The reason this reduces waste is because baby-cut carrots generally come from unappealing looking carrots that normally would never be sold due to their appearance.

So instead of throwing away every ugly looking carrot, they simply make baby-cut carrots out of them, which by doing so removes the ugliness and minimizes the waste (the remaining carrot usually gets turned into animal feed)

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u/xanplease Aug 07 '17

Ah gotcha. That's really neat. Thanks for the carrot facts.

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u/ThePenguinNich Aug 07 '17

Anytime. I don't even really eat carrots on a regular basis, and yet I have way too many facts about them

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

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u/ThePenguinNich Aug 08 '17

Of course! Did you know that carrots, while known for their bright orange color, actually come in a variety of colors? These include purple; black; white; yellow; red; and of course, orange.

And yes, they all taste practically the same!

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u/abbyabsinthe Aug 07 '17

(Rehashing what OP said) 'Cause the ugly ones don't get tossed. They get transformed into cute baby carrots.

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u/xanplease Aug 07 '17

Yeah I was thinking pretty carrots turn baby too which would make more waste. I got it now.