Incredibly curious carrot

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Not terribly surprising, though quite uncommon.As a kid i ate regular sized carrots often and my favorite thing to do was to try to finagle the core of the carrot out for fun. Its typically easier to do if you can make a lengthwise slit down the carrot, then work the inner core out. I presume the particular baby carrot in the video got cracked or accidentally cut, while leaving the core intact which popped out by happenstance.

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So-called “baby carrots” are actually blemished or deformed “adult carrots”. The defective carrots are cut into short lengths and lathed down to remove the abnormalities. It’s much more profitable than selling them as horse feed or just pureeing/mulching them.

I guess the cutting machine made an extra partial cut for some reason. The rest of it is the natural core of the carrot as Grey_Devil pointed out. Maybe hitting the slightly denser core triggered a safety halt in the cutting machine.

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As mentioned ‘baby’ carrots are lathed. into their shape. I’m not sure why the core would be replaced into that carrot.

But it’s exactly the same shape and form from a “Vegetable turning” lath…or vegetable turner. (the kind of thing that makes those long strands of carrots or radishes at Japanese sushi bars). I have one and it’s great for making raw zucchini threads, or garnishes for sushi and shashimi.
http://www.bharatmoms.com/uploads/Image/Spiral%20Vegetable%20Slicer%20cutter.JPG

I’m guessing it was just a fracture, which didn’t propagate through the core. that and a loose core, nothing but tumbling around necessary.

mandatory: http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llbsxsrhDY1qznpkco1_500.png

Maybe this was just an “old” carrot. Sometimes when they’ve been growing for more than a year they develop a woody core.

According to Wikipedia, baby-cut carrots are cut into 2-inch lengths and then tumbled in rotating peeling tanks that scrape off the skin and round the edges. This is probably a lot more efficient than being shaped on a lathe. (Reminds me of the old joke about individual toothpicks being lathed down from whole trees!)

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The NEW and IMPROVED BOING BOING!!
A carrot. Just look at it.

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Don’t think we didn’t notice the distinct lack of bananas in this post!

There is enough love to go around. JUST LOOK AT IT!

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“I am curious orange.”

Nature, how does that work?

Looks like somebody disturbed a rabbit while it was making a container to hide its stash.

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Hadn’t heard that, now have an image of some sweatshop with skilled machinists lathing away at a pile of carrots.

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I suspect it was the Curious Orange that caused me to read this headline as being about an inquisitive carrot, rather than an odd one.

Curious Orange later honed those natural skills and had a long investigative career with the FBI. Special Agent Orange solved many puzzling crimes, often bypassing red herrings to cut straight to the root of the situation.

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I was under the impression that rather than being defective, the carrots used for baby carrots were a different hybrid with a higher sugar content and lower angle of taper so you can get more appropriate-diameter small ones from one big one without wasting too much from the top.

At least in my experience, “baby carrots” are actual small carrots. “Baby-cut carrots” are the regular carrots lathed into weird little pellet shapes.

That’s a Soviet-era dead drop. They’re scattered all over the place…

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These seem like good explanations, but I think the answer is more simple: What you have spotted is a male and female caroot. And that’s where baby carrots really come from.

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