Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Carrots

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy podcaster/creator Jack O'Brien ('The Daily Zeitgeist' podcast) and bestselling author Jason Pargin ('John Dies At The End' series, 'Zoey Ashe' series) for a look at why carrots are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, you're about to hear episode 99 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating 9-9. I've been running a membership drive from now until episode 100, and you can count. So yeah, this is the final week of that drive. This is it. Here's all you need to know for the final week of the drive. We've hit a bunch of the goals already, and so those are getting fulfilled, and I'm putting that stuff out and doing those new things for patrons and some of them for listeners in general. There's a set of further goals that depend on additional financial support.

I can't do them without your help. So if we make it happen within this last week of the drive, I'll go ahead and do them. And if we don't, I need to put them on the back burner. I need to focus on what I can do with this show with the support it has. back burner. I need to focus on what I can do with this show with the support it has. One good example of all that is the very next goal for the show, which we might have hit if we had an amazing day or two between when I taped this and now. But the next goal is to do regular and frequent and consistent live episodes of the podcast. And one of the key building blocks of that is guest pay, because I've always paid guests on the live shows even before we hit that guest pay goal. And it pays more than a regular episode. And so

there's expense there. Without that additional support, I just can't do live shows very often. So that's the pitch for this last week. If you jump in and support the show, maybe we hit new goals. Maybe we can do new things. If you don't, we don't, and that's okay, because holy cow, I am already overjoyed about how these weeks have gone, how many dozens of new people have shown up and backed the show, or told a friend to check it out, and maybe that friend backs the show, and those are the two greatest things you can do for a podcast like this. So many of you have done that, and I'm just really grateful. I'm excited for this last week of the drive. I am thrilled to bring you episode 100, and then 101, and 102, and 103, and on and on, all because of backers. Oh, and speaking of episode numbers, please enjoy episode 99.

Carrots. Known for being orange. Famous for being vitamins. Nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why carrots are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by two wonderful guests this week. You've heard Jack O'Brien on the past episodes of this show about potatoes and about sewers. Also, I hope you've heard him any weekday on his own podcast, The Daily Zeitgeist, or on his new NBA podcast titled Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties. Those are both co-hosted with

the great Miles Gray and just wonderful stuff. And then you've heard Jason Pargin on several episodes of this show, most recently about chocolate. He's a full-time novelist, best-selling novelist. His next book on the way is titled If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. That's the title. If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. It's available for pre-order. It's also the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. It also stands on its own and explains itself, so if you haven't

read any of that series, don't sweat it. You can jump in. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. I acknowledge Jack recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Jack recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Tsotsiyaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about carrots. A self-explanatory topic. Also, I have two additional things to say. Two other things to say about this episode and how it turned out, how it shaped up.

The first thing to say is that this episode is a little bit time-warpy, because Jack and Jason both brought in a lot of old stories from an old job. A website called Cracked.com was a former workplace for all three of us together, I probably should have expected some old memories to come up. After taping this, I did some rough back of the napkin estimating, and I believe the three of us all put together spent a combined 30 years, three zero, 30 years working at that website. Wow, numbers and stats already. And it's also a couple more years if we tag on my freelance work. And then Jack and Jason pretty much invented that website, other than the branding. That name cracked is from a 1950s satire magazine. I know this all sounds very random, whether or not you've heard of the website. But I hope it's not a drag that

this podcast will talk about a website that you've probably never heard of. It's not relevant to the podcast I make now, but it is relevant to the three of us and our backgrounds and spending time together. So not surprised it comes up, and I hope you roll with it. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is that the Dutch come up a lot on this carrots episode, and I think that's wonderful. Because if you've heard last week's show about tulips, or if you've heard the recent show about the color

orange, there's going to be an extra rich experience for you. This is sort of a accidental trilogy of podcasts about Dutch history and culture in an exciting way. So please sit back or open up Adobe Illustrator to generate a movie poster for the third movie of a SifPod Dutch history trilogy. I did think of a title for it. It is Return of the Jedikes. You like a dyke like a dam. Very fun. Here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, Jack, it is so good to have you, as always. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. I think we can start.

How do you feel about carrots? My God. This guy really gets right into it, doesn't he? No formalities. I haven't seen him in months. He just comes right at me with questions about a very sensitive subject for me. Carrots. Carrots. I'm going to kick this off with a useful life hack for those of you who tuned in and maybe you're new to the show and you're like why am i listening to a whole show about carrots

they can't be that interesting one they are that's the promise of the show but if you don't believe us um here's a life hack for you i personally do not like any carrots that I've made myself at home or that I've bought or eaten, but I love carrots quite a bit. Eat them just fine when they are cooked in a dish in a restaurant. And I talked to a guy who worked at a number of restaurants and asked, what's the secret? Like, what do they do? And he said, what they do, and it's interesting, when they cook their vegetables they just cook them in like two inches of butter heck yeah butter so that so and the science behind it is is that the the vegetables have like cells that contain like water if you

can replace that with pure fat and salt yes they taste much better. So if you can turn the carrot into a sponge that is soaked up a bunch of liquid melted butter and use that as basically just a container, a vessel to deliver butter into the diner, that's when you've actually created a good tasting vegetable. And you can do it at home. I've tried it. Just orange carrot shaped sticks of butter is essentially what you get. It's just a vessel. It's almost like a mold for butter. And here's the thing, Jack, it can really be anything. Broccoli, fish, anything at all. It's like people tell me they love the taste of lobster. It's like,

no, you don't. You love dipping lobster in the little butter tub of melted butter if they could just give you a bigger thing of butter you would actually enjoy the meal better they give you a plate of anything and you could dip it in there yeah that's a that's the secret if you're a food just make it uh the thing that oh well you have to have it dipped in just drenched in drawn butter popcorn. Yeah. So this is actually big for me because I actually, the only way I've ever been able to motivate myself basically to do anything is either with the promise of a nice carrot at the end of a job well done or in the case that I fail a stick,

which I just brutally beat myself with. Um, those are, and that's, that's my system. That's the Jack alpha billionaire mentality system, um, that you can read about in my upcoming, uh, book that has me just a picture of me on the cover with my arms crossed. Uh, and yeah. Okay. okay i i have right away right away i have to bring this podcast to a screeching halt and and i can express beef with what jack just said the phrase the phrase carrot on a stick i thought it was the thing where you sit on a horse or donkey with a stick a pole and then at dangling at the end of the pole on a string is a carrot. And the animal will try to get the carrot, but the carrot is floating in front of them.

And they're so stupid, they don't realize, oh, it's just me holding the carrot on a stick. But everyone uses the phrase the way Jack just did. When they talk about how a boss was too rough, they'll say, well, you know, it was too much. It was not enough carrot and too much stick. Like he didn't offer positive motivation. He was always threatening to beat them with the stick instead of giving them the carrot. One of us is wrong about the origin of that phrase. I don't care about the origin.

I care about results, Jason. I'm in the results business, brother. I'm beating myself senseless with a stick when I fail. I think that's actually mainly what it's about. I don't know. I don't really even like carrots that much. It's really the beatings that are getting the job done for me. I think I understood that phrase both ways.

I thought it was holding a carrot in front of a horse's path, and then you have like a second stick for the hitting, right? Which is a real mess as far as understanding the phrase. But that's two sticks. Yeah, right, two sticks. Carrot on a stick and a stick. Like he has two hands, you know because if you use the stick with the carrot attached to beat the animal it's going to go thrashing around trying to chase the carrot as you flail around hitting it's going to be like trying to reach back and snatch the carrot and eat it yeah right anyway someone out there who actually knows which of those is correct uh some future episode maybe maybe a Alex will talk about it. How about you, Alex? Do you like carrots?

I do. I think I'm the most pro carrot. I like them raw the most, especially because I think when I served them cooked as a kid, sometimes they're really mushy. I like a raw carrot and I like carrots just a whole lot. I think they're delicious. They're up there with corn. They're up there with green beans, especially like a pan fried Chinese style green bean. Really great. Way into carrots. Really related to the topic of the bonus show, Bugs Bunny, because he was so into them. Yeah. Okay. So this is going to blow you guys. I don't want it to come across like I wasn't listening when you were talking, Alex, because I was. But I was also researching the origin of the phrase carrot and stick. You're not going to believe this, but the original cartoon of the carrot and stick was about two riders, one who was beating his

donkey with a stick and the other who was relaxing and tempting his donkey with a stick, but with a carrot or turnip tied to the end of it, saying that he was the more merciful one because the other guy was like wearing himself out and cruelly beating it. And the other guy is just chilling and relaxing and offering it as in. So it was a very basic lesson about offering incentives instead of threatening people. The beatings will continue until morale improves so that's what it was supposed to be so it is both they're both equally right so people just use the phrase carrot and stick um but yeah i felt like i i feel such a weight

lifted i the the tension between jason and i uh was thick um i'm glad we got to the bottom of that and it's so weird that that phrase is i feel like the most accurate version of the phrase is carrot and stick or stick you know which is a really clumsy thing obviously everyone's confused yeah and it's not i was gonna i was gonna suggest carrot and or stick but that's not right it's not, I was going to, I was going to suggest carrot and or stick, but that's not right. It's carrot and stick or stick. Yes. That's the proper way to say it. You will not for now. And you will sound like a fool if you don't say it that way.

It's the carrot and stick or just the stick. Right. Yeah. And then you have to, you have to show them the drawing to make it clear what you're referencing. I also, I like that animals. And again, we'll talk more about rabbits in the bonus, but i like that animals and again we'll talk more about rabbits in the bonus but i like that animals are so famous for liking carrots like jack when you were talking about your business success strategies of carrot and stick i was imagining like a business book by an animal like like a horse being like this this is what it's about very cocky horse with like yeah with its arms crossed somehow yeah um

i i assumed all animals rabbits fish anything would like a good carrot if you just put it in front of them we had one we i've had three dogs in my life um one of them did like carrots and it was the first one so i was like this is true the carrots are the answer to feeding anything uh and then none of my other dogs liked like the carrots so yeah if you have any if there are any listeners out there if you're having trouble getting your pets to eat carrots there's a way you can prepare them that almost any living thing will enjoy them more. Well, and we have a bunch of stuff about carrots and their history and role in the world.

So let's get into it. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called numbers and statistics have a lot of tricks percentages make me sick and i think it's fly when a guy named alex reads those numbers reads those numbers i like podcasts hosted by guys named schmidt i'd listen if i had one wish so we'll listen while the clam reads those numbers reads those numbers wow beautiful thank you that's that's to to the tune of what oh come on i mean this this is jason being a little bit shy about the fact

that he has always been a huge lfo fan from the first day I met him. That was one of the things that he mentioned. It's the song about how they like girls who wear Abercrombie and Fitch and Chinese food makes them sick. Yeah. I was partly just really excited to replace the actual lyrics of Summer Girls. Not bad into them. So, Eddie, deviation, really good. And that name was submitted by Daniel Clark. What a great idea. Thank you, Daniel. New name every week. Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible.

Submit to SifPod on Twitter or SifPod at gmail.com. Or brilliant, like that one just was. Yeah. You can do that, too. Right. Or perfect. Same address. Same email. Same email.

Same Twitter. And first number here is a bit of carrot history. It's the 1930s. And the 1930s is when a team of Soviet agronomists, thank you, Soviet agronomists, they developed the current theory of the origin of the carrots we eat today. The source here is a book called Vegetables, a Biography that's by Evelyn Bloch-Dano, and that's in French. It's translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. But Bloch-Dano says there was a 1930s scientific mission to study crops grown in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the goal was to discover things that would boost agriculture. They accidentally found that there was a huge variety of carrots there, just all kinds of different species and varieties.

And they decided that this mountainous region of Western and Central Asia must be the center of carrot biodiversity and probably the origin of modern carrot crops. So Afghanistan, Kashmir, there's other cultural and historical evidence backing that up, but 1930s Soviets did some botanical, agricultural checking of that being where carrots are from. And did they succeed? Did they manage to start popping out big loads of carrots for the Soviet people? of carrots for the soviet people i actually don't know if they lifted any good tricks or tips they just found out like this carrot fact for us the three of us so we benefited yeah well done all right i'll allow it well done soviet agronomists i was withholding my praise but all right fine but this gets into what i find interesting about this subject and why I wanted to do this episode. Because the thing they were investigating was not where God put the carrots on the earth when he created it 6,000 years ago. They were trying to find where people had invented carrots. And this is something that I feel like everybody knows if you pin them down on it, but nobody ever thinks about, which is that when you go to the grocery store, everything in that produce section is man-made. In the early 2000s or somewhere around then, there was a viral video from some televangelist who gave this entire, had this entire bit he did on the 700 Club or whatever.

I think it was Kirk Cameron, actually. It may have been Kirk Cameron. But he did a thing on how the banana was proof that the Earth had an intelligent design because the banana fits perfectly in the hand. It peels easily and it has all these nutrients that humans needs. Like this is evidence that God put bananas on the earth for us. And, you know, otherwise, what a coincidence it would be. And the guy was blissfully unaware that, of course, the banana, as you see it in the grocery store, did not exist until banana farmers made them. The wild version of the banana is not something you could eat or would want to eat.

It was developed over centuries. So when you're talking about the carrot, you're talking about the invention of a thing. And we're going to dig into the exact steps that went through. And because people are afraid of like genetic modification, stuff like that. But we've been doing this forever. Yeah. Big time.

That's I, I still remember, um, like there was an article we did about like things you won't believe are manmade back at cracked, which was a website that we used to all work for. Like the picture of what corn started out as, and then like what what what it eventually became

and you know the the fact that it basically just looked like a like wild grass so when you go from a wild like piece of grass to corn on the cob or when you go to what bananas used to look like to what bananas look like now, there's a similarity in the shape that they're going for. Do you know what I'm talking about? Doesn't it seem very phallic? They were like, you know what would be better? If instead of having these two little pieces of corn on the tip of a uh stalk of grass um it was just a giant like you know looking thing that was covered in corn i've always just liked to imagine what that first uh reveal was like like i've i'm sure it wasn't like all at once, but still it's fun for me to imagine.

And if you could have shown them like what the future will look like and said, look, this agriculture based civilization you are making, you're bringing into existence, like someday they're going to go to the moon and let us show you the vehicle they used. The vehicle that they used. And like a little tear would come to their eye. We did them proud. We did them proud, boys.

I also, this reminded me of one of my favorite jokes about carrots is on the colbert report when stephen colbert used to do that character like he had a strong belief that baby carrots are trying to make him gay and he and in and his character did not like that you know but like he yeah i think it's something about how a baby carrot is somewhat less phallic like it's shorter it's smaller like they never explained the joke he just always said that was what was going on and i think it's tapping into this weird thing yeah well and as we'll learn it's the it it's not a baby carrot technically so the thing that it most has it's like a baby shaped thing like that that is the shape of a baby yeah so i don't i don't know if you're

allowed to say that on this podcast but uh i've had baby boys and that's that's the thing that the baby carrots most resemble it's just what's going on we get just what's happening the number about it right away the the next number is 1989 and 1989 is the year when a California farmer started production of baby carrots. That's when they were essentially invented. And the source for this is another book. There's a book called The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat. It's by food historian Joel S. Denker. But he writes about Bakersfield, California farmer Mike Yerosek, who pretty much invented this whole thing that so many of us eat. He had a large carrot growing and packing operation. Apparently he was dealing with 400 tons of imperfect carrots per day.

An imperfect carrot is totally edible. It just doesn't look like the phallic thing, basically, that we all want. But also some of them are split into two carrots or just another shape that people are not used to. And at the time, those were mostly getting diced up into super tiny pieces by frozen vegetable companies, like a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, the little carrot cubes in there. Right. The shredded carrots that you're throwing on your salad or whatever. Right. Right. yeah. Yeah, just all the tiniest slicing and dicing.

And he said, hey, can we sell these imperfect carrots fresh? And so they started dividing them into identical two-inch pieces that are just sculpted. It was a huge hit. Immediately, that became a huge product line. It got to the point where the industry will take quote unquote, perfect carrots and make those baby carrots too. And this whole time, not everybody knows like baby carrots are the exact same as regular Bugs Bunny

carrots. They're just chopped and sculpted. That's it. Cause I did not know that. I thought they were literally, maybe because the product said they're baby carrots. I thought they were just young carrots. And so I guess I assumed they were more tender or something. But no, they're just taking normal carrots, putting them into a machine that grinds off all of the rest of the carrot except for the baby carrot part. Obviously, they get more than one out of each carrot. They're not just destroying the whole thing down to baby carrot size or else they'd be very expensive. Just because we're so

lazy that we don't want to have to like chop our big carrots down to snack sized. This is what capitalism is very good at when it comes to feeding people. It's like the stuff that nobody wanted. Yeah, it's like It's like the ugly carrots. Like, well, I'm not throwing that away. We paid several pennies for those. Find a way to get people to eat them. Find a way. Like, well, we can just shave off all the bits

and then claim they're babies? Fine. People love that. They get to destroy something innocent? Yeah. We'll call them carrot veal and it'll be like yeah they've suffered like the mascot is a cruel industrialist or something like but people are like yes yes we love it have you ever seen have you ever seen a uh like baseball bat being made in one of

those machines that like kind of shaves it down and is very it's i think i've seen it on that like better every loop type um thing where it's just it's being sculpted like really fast as it's it's like spinning and then there's like a blade that's like shaving it down. And that is now how I'm picturing the baby carrot being made is because it does. There's a smoothness to it. Like it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would be easy to do with a knife without like putting it on something that spins it around rapidly and shaves, shaves down all the all the hard edges. Oh, to be clear, whatever machine is making baby carrots it is something that if you stuck your hand into it would just grind it right up without that's what your hand would look like now yeah without even slowing down it wouldn't even it

wouldn't even make a noise when they did it it would just uh no that is i don't doubt that is a brutal process but again that is a bit of marketing genius because you have something that is very pleasant to hold in your hand and it looks like something that's better than the version that nature gave us which is yeah yeah right there's it feels like there's no uh friction like there's no knobby weird stuff from the ground it's just like oh the oh, the perfect food. Thanks. Great. Right. I'm a Jetson.

Good. Yeah. Jetson carrots. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess there's another number three. That is, according to Joel Stenker's book, how many baby carrots they usually get out of a actual carrot.

It's all carrot, but that's, that's usually how it goes. And they've tried to develop some longer varieties where you can get four. So that's sort of the trajectory of a lot of carrot hybridization and developing varieties is how long can this be? How many baby carrots can we turn this dumb regular carrot into? And next number, much bigger. It is about 4,500 years. And that's how old some wild carrot seeds are that were found in Central Europe by archaeologists. And this is Joel S. Denker's book again. He says that archaeologists found wild carrot seeds from around 2500 BC at Neolithic campsites in what's now Germany and Switzerland. at Neolithic campsites in what's now Germany and Switzerland. But also these wild carrots, this is still a plant we have today.

It's just very different from the carrots in the grocery store. This is primarily a flowering, weedy plant. In North America, it's often called Queen Anne's Lace. The main feature is above ground, you get big bunches of tiny white flowers. And below ground, there is a tiny white taproot the the taproot is the official name like the botanical name for the whole orange thing that we eat in a farm carrot but the uh the tiny root there is super bitter tasting its scientific name comes from the Greek word dokos, which means burn, because this plant has mainly been used

to feed grazing animals with the big green flowery part. And then that little bottom part was first ever used as medicine. So this is a totally different plant. I'm going to do a, this is violating a podcast rule, but I'm going to ask the host something that I'm not sure if he knows. In terms of evolution, is the idea that of the root being bitter so that it does not get eaten? Because presumably if they bite the green

part off, that will simply regrow. But if they take up that root and eat that part, it's now a dead, it's dead. It can't, obviously, that's the part that grows. So is it an adaptation where it survived by itself being like selection, like the ones that tasted bad? It's like a defense against the cow pulling it up and trying to eat the whole. is like a defense against the cow pulling it up and trying to eat the whole i yeah that's something i don't know but i'm pretty sure because because what i do know and we'll talk more about later is that the taproot is a storehouse of energy to create more plants up top above the ground and so this this wild carrot is basically the reverse of our farm carrots, where the goal is a bunch of stuff above the ground, and what's below the ground is just there to fuel that.

And is the taproot just going on to continue to try to stump you? But I think this is a dumb question that I just never understood. What does taproot mean? Is that like the main root? Oh, I have to Google it to be sure i'll drop something in if it's different i believe it's because this root is sort of tapping into the ground is the idea sort of like if you tap into a tree for maple syrup it's one spiky tool you know okay got it i'll correct that if that's not the thing jack I think he just pulled that out of his butt. I know. That sounded like such bull.

Wow. Yeah, it seems like a straight tapering root growing vertically downward seems to be the thing. So I think you're right. I don't know if it came from, you know, tapping the keg or whatever you said it was. But yeah, I think finally now we're talking about beer. Finally. I don't know if it came from, you know, tapping the keg or whatever you said it was. But yeah, I think finally now we're talking about beer. Finally, the show is fun, folks. And the last number for the takeaways, because we have a couple of them.

Last number is something Jason discovered. I didn't know about it, but the number is 13 years. something Jason discovered. I didn't know about it, but the number is 13 years. And 13 years is how long a Canadian woman lost her diamond engagement ring before finding it again, thanks to a carrot. And it turns out there's a whole genre of news story where somebody loses a ring, usually a diamond ring. And then by farming carrots in the area of the ground where they dropped it, a carrot grows around the ring, and then they pull carrots in the area of the ground where they dropped it, a carrot grows around the ring and then they pull it back up out of the ground and find the ring again. Specifically, they pull a carrot out of the soil and the carrot is wearing the ring. This was something that came up in a Cracked article pitch years and years ago. And then we

ran it because it was like an article about we did lists for people who've never been to the site. And it was like weird coincidences. This is like the one in a billion chance this person had lost their ring. Again, not a month earlier, but it was more than a decade earlier. And then this thing had, they'd lost it out in the yard or in their garden or whatever. And somehow, by some long odds, a carrot root grew down through the ring under the soil wherever it happened to get buried. And when they pulled the carrot up, it had grown into the ring and the carrot was wearing the ring.

It sounds like something out of a fairy tale. But then years later, somebody else tries to pitch that in an article. And we tried not to reuse facts if we could avoid it. Yeah. Back then. Yeah. And I was like, well, no, we, we did that story already. And then I looked it up and it's like a different name. And it's like, wait, it happened again. So what Alex is talking about, I went, I just sat down and started Googling carrot comes up growing lost ring. I found four news stories from all around the world just in the last 10 years going back to about 2000 2000 it was a 2011 there's one in 2016 one

in 2018 one in 2017 and obviously and jack asked the same question that i know a lot of listeners are asking are these farmers just doing this to screw with us? Are they intentionally, like, when they're planting, they're poking the seed down through their wife's... Because it's like the whole story is always that the ring was precious to them, right? It's like, my grandmother's ring, she passed away. I felt terrible. We could never find it. But you instantly get in the

news because with this photo and it's always a photo of you holding up this carrot, wearing this, your grandmother's lost ring. And it happens over and over and over again. So I don't know how to calculate the odds of this happening. Maybe in all of the carrot gardens in all the world and all of the rings that people lose in their yards, maybe it's just the odds are that every few years somebody. But these are just the ones that made the paper. Right. Like not every example of this has been something that I was able to Google in 20 minutes. has been something that I was able to Google in 20 minutes. And yeah, and I got four over the course of a decade. So like once every two, two and a half, three years, this occurs.

Now, Alex, the way you told the story suggested that there might be some intentionality, like that they lost the ring in an area and then just planted carrots in that area to intentionally retrieve, which would actually make more sense to me if they were like, this is just an old farmer's almanac type cure for finding lost rings as well. You just absolutely plant the daylights out of the soil where you lost the ring with carrots, and soon enough you're going to pull the ring up on one of those carrots i mean i think i think we might be inventing that

now yeah because this is this is definitely just farmers lose them while they're doing and this also makes me think if i was a farmer i would only wear my wedding ring like two minutes out of the day because the rest of the day you're doing intense manual labor where you could lose your ring easily. But yeah, this farmer's like losing the ring in the carrot patch. And then this can, and as Jason said, this all over the world,

it's 2011 in Sweden, 2016 in Germany, 2018 in England. And then in 2017, Mary grams of Alberta, Canada, she had lost the ring in 2004 while pulling weeds in the family farm garden. And then 13 years later, her daughter-in-law found it.

And there was a carrot grown around it. It is, based on the picture, like the carrot is so much wider than the ring. I feel like this is kind of hard to fake. Like the carrot really grew around it and then back out through it in a very natural way it's kind of amazing there's also this is a thing you hear about in like from fishermen like they'll tell stories about that and then i just googled fish lost ring um because i'm good at google and i know exactly the search term to uh use and uh there's a report of a snorkeler's reportedly discovered a man's missing wedding ring after spotting it around a fish's neck.

There you go. Which sounds, again, completely impossible. I mean, I just bring it up because fishermen are known for never telling lies. So it's got to be true if fishermen said it happened um i don't know i'm still skeptical each of them has personally caught the largest fish in the world it's really cool it's true it's true yeah it's wow but yeah whole thing and thank you carrots i i legitimately i don't think anyone will do it but i like the idea that we're inventing the cure for if you lose your ring on ground, you can just scatter carrot seeds and check later.

That's great. Yeah. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break. We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience one you have no choice but to embrace because yes listening is mandatory the jv club with janet varney is available every thursday on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls well uh and then we have a couple big takeaways about the rest of this carrot situation. And the first one is about a lot of what we talked about, about human intervention. Takeaway number one. Big orange carrots are a relatively recent phenomenon.

And in particular, them being orange is only from about the past 500 years. Before that, and to this day, carrots have been widely eaten at other sizes and in other colors, in particular purple. And also, if you live in like Turkey or West Asia, you may know everything coming here about other colors for carrots. That's the home region in particular, can come and hear about other colors for carrots that's the the home region in particular the not orange ones i feel like that's a things that a kitchen that offers artisanal and just that word anywhere on their menu will will uh pride itself in offering carrots that don't that aren't orange like that that feels like a a recent food trend a rediscovery in the foodie community. But they don't really taste different, right?

Yeah, they taste pretty much the same. We'll talk about some slight vitamin differences and stuff. But yeah, you're still getting that same general kind of plant. I'm thinking of blue potato chips now. I remember being offered blue potato chips in a fancy situation. And you flipped the bowl that they were, they were offered to you in. Right. He said, what devilry is this?

I am no fun. Yeah. To be around. I don't want to, I don't want to come off. Like I wasn't listening to what you just said. Cause I was, um, I am looking at a photo of a lost engagement ring wrapped around a potato. All right. So it's just anything in the ground.

Yeah. Okay. Which makes sense. I mean, again, it just has to grow through there just right. Like it's one in a million. Again, unless they just carefully cultivated it this way. But yeah, so it is not as common. I have photographic supposed proof of it happening at least once. And with carrots, as far as their change in color over time,

there's a couple sources here. It's the two books from those numbers, The Carrot Purple by Joel S. Denker and Vegetables, a Biography by Evelyn Bloch-Tano. And then a research compilation book called Food, a Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present that's edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. A lot of Europeans this week. A lot of that going on. Massimo Montanari did the bulk of the work on that. I think it's ridiculous that John Lewis Flandrin got their name put first. You've always said that. I was holding my breath. When you brought those two up, I was like, oh, Jason's going to come with his take on how... Fagin' Erasure, or whatever the guy's name is.

I already forgot the name. And then I, Joe Rogan style, am going to make a five--hour podcast with John Louis Flandrin because he's been silenced by these critics. Thank you. All of the most controversial theories he tried to get in there were cruelly taken out at the last minute by the backstabbing Massimo Montanari. Massimo Montanari. Just, again, the greatest name. Well done, sir, Massimo Montanari. Whatever fictional writer came up with that. Starting with the color of carrots.

In the numbers, we covered that the domesticated carrot, like the crop carrot came from Central and Western Asia. It turns out the first main carrots from that region were purple. For centuries, if you were eating carrots there, you were like, yeah, that purple vegetable, great. There was either a mutation or cultivation that led to yellow carrots. And so purple and yellow ones were the main ones. And along the way, people developed some red types and some white types. We don't start to get orange ones until around the 15 and 1600s in Europe. And this is where I'm and obviously this has been lost to history, but I'd be very curious to know if they didn't. Because, again, the theory is that they may have started intentionally breeding them, even though it didn't change the flavor, breeding them to a different color. And I do wonder if that wasn't for market, like if they didn't just decide that that was a more appealing because I think a purple carrot like in a stew would look gross. Because I think a purple carrot like in a stew would look gross.

You know, they were making things to look appealing one way or the other for sale or for whatever. So they would have every motivation to do it, even if, you know, modern capitalism didn't exist back then. They still needed to make an appealing finished product. So that's interesting to me that we don't know if it happened by accident or if there's some enterprising person who's like the only thing i don't like about carrots is how they look right it's that's that's a weird it it's it's a unpleasant color to have in my in my uh my chili or whatever whatever they were making the color orange you know like we there are certain medications we make orange and fruit juices we will make orange like it's it suggests m&ms we make orange the wrapping paper around uh the best candy uh reese's peanut butter cups it suggests

like sunshine and happiness and like it's a happy it's just a happy color whereas like sleep medication is always blue blue is the color of being sleepy and tired or whatever. Or dead. Or dead. Yeah. And I also I wonder if at least some of this is social, too, because like orange carrots feel bright to me and feel sunshiny to me. And then I was surprised to learn that in some countries, especially Turkey turkey they're still eating tons of purple carrots and like there are i especially associate modern processed foods with being like like blue raspberry in a way that is thrilling to me in a childlike way i'm like hell yeah i'm

glad that's bright technicolor blue in a way nothing is good yeah great yeah i feel like that's where the um the like artisanal backlash thing is coming from is like well carrots shouldn't be orange because that's what my brain wants them to be and like that's just the like i can't trust my brain anymore because it's been tricked for so long by it like the straightforward you know machinations of um capitalism but i think there's something with the social thing you know i used I used to wear bouquets of carrots around my neck to court women. Just

let them know. Because you're a horse and they were fellow horses. We're interested. Yeah. As far as this progression, it is also at least partly branding because some people in Europe said purple carrots, too irritating. Apparently, we had this spread of domesticated

carrots where they spread east from Iran to China in the 1200s, then Japan in the 1600s. And then the same progression goes west. They reach Holland, France, and Germany in the 1300s. And then Joel S. Denker says refugees from Flanders were the first to bring carrots to England. That's how England got them in the first place. But according to Joel S. Denker, Northern and Central Europeans way preferred the yellow carrots to the purple carrots in particular, because cooks would complain about getting purple stains on their hands from handling purple carrots. Also, if you do a dish or a stew where you're mixing purple carrots with other stuff, apparently that purple color really dominates.

You just end up with a fully purple dish, even if the other stuff was not purple in the first place. And so Europe over and over again grows yellow carrots and at some point gets a mutation where they drift toward orange. And voila marketing. Yeah. Everyone's like, hot damn. That's the color. I do wonder if like they turned orange and someone was like, that's what it should be. Right. Like these should,

we should all be orange, right? Like that looks like a carrot. Everything else prior to this doesn't look like a carrot. That looks like a carrot to me. everything else prior to this doesn't look like a carrot that looks like a carrot to me well for example like if cheese is just made from you know curded milk or whatever there's no reason it should be orange right but somebody used orange you know if you have a child you say draw me a piece of you know draw me a piece of cheese they're gonna get out an orange crayon because cheese is orange. Well, that's purely something to color the fact that cheese, you know, a lot of cheeses are kind of plus colored if you don't do something to them.

And orange was just one of the most pleasant colors they came up with to, it kind of looks good on the shelf or whatever. But that's, yeah, that's interesting that the purple dye, again, they're not saying that it ruined the dish in terms of its taste. It just made everything look sloppy. It's like ink, right? Like it wears something with an orange tinge. If you're putting that in your nach your uh nachos it doesn't it doesn't bother it and they knew one day that we would have instagram and you know it was all going to

be about the look yeah because we even like we idealize a purple in like a grape because even most real grapes are not very purple they'll even be just fully not that color but like welch's grape we're like that's correct that's what i'm looking for and then with carrots we were like whoa whoa whoa that looks really weird yeah purple purple on savory doesn't work but purple on sweet is okay i feel like in at least in our cultural norms right yeah like in the U.S. Purple on Mountain Dew, apparently very good. The new purple version of Mountain Dew is apparently great. And that's really the new innovation in this kind of science, where now, like, instead of like having energy drinks that are just called, you know, blueberry or apple or orange, it's like dark thunder purple thunder yeah purple

thunder is the mountain it's an abstract concept and the takeout review of it is i don't detect any of the fruit flavors that they've suggested uh all i can say is that it tastes exactly like the concept of purple and they gave it like an a plus and said it's the best food that they've ever put in their mouth if you could go back to these the dutch traders in the 1600s and give them like a mountain dew baja blast yeah they said what flavors are this you said oh it's baja blast i think they'd say yeah yeah no that's right so like that we have invented abstract concepts of flavor that can't be connected to anything in in the lord's creation but it's uh yeah it's what our greatest artists are doing now i think the last energy drink i had was a c4 bombsicle it's like if you had me put on a blindfold and drink it it asked me what flavors i detected i think i

would eventually arrive at i don't like a bombsicle i don't know it's like it's it's like a mixture of a bomb and a popsicle uh yeah well and speaking of artists right developing all these things artists are part of how we're able to track the origin of orange carrots because there was a study in the 1950s by a dutch agronomist get out of here soviets a dutch agronomist named otto benga and he he examined still life paintings like in the Louvre and in other major art museums. And he noticed starting in the 1600s in Dutch art specifically, there start to be yellowish orange carrots or fully orange carrots. And there's not purple, there's not regular yellow.

And based on that and other ways we can study the actual biology of carrots, we believe that four different Dutch varieties of orange carrot are the origin of all the modern orange carrots that we've proceeded to plant in most places in the world. reached out to me about this when I did a whole episode about the color orange, because there's a very reasonable mistaken belief that orange carrots were developed in the 1600s Netherlands to celebrate the brand new 1600s Netherlands ruled by the House of Orange rebelling against Spain, very patriotic. It turns out that's probably just a coincidence. Just this royal house that branded itself and its country on the color orange and carrots that are the color orange kind of happened at the same time it wasn't farmers trying to be patriots yeah and then maybe a fact that we printed as true and in correct when we

were there but it's it's too late the 30 percent that we were just like we really don't have time to fact check this we're just gonna uh it sounds pretty good none of us have access to the cms to go in and add a disclaimer to that so it's yeah very much cut off from that uh yeah but yeah i mean like something like that where like a color becomes popular, like an idea or a phrase like becomes popular and, you know, it starts popping up in different places. Like maybe they don't need to be intentionally related, but. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I can definitely see just people. People were feeling orange in that, you know, handful of centuries in that region of the world.

That's true. Yeah. And it is a very surprising coincidence. handful of centuries in that region of the world. That's true, yeah. And it is a very surprising coincidence. You would not think those things would line up, but they just seem to, yeah. Because it mainly seems to just be that Europeans grew so many yellow carrots over and over again because they didn't like the purple ones that eventually things progressed, yeah.

Oh, interesting. So it wasn't even intentional necessarily. Yeah, because there are also people who still stuck to purple carrots in a lot of parts of the world in particular the country of turkey apparently you can get a summer drink there named salgam which is pickled purple carrots as the main ingredient so that's not you know orange is not the only way to go and it's relatively new on the scene as far as plants go. That was a summer drink. That was like a thirst-quenching summer drink.

It's the equivalent of purple thunder for some communities. And then the other big change we've done is the root size. Because as you said, the taproot is the official term for the entire underground vegetable of a carrot. So when we're eating a carrot, we're technically eating the taproot. And before human intervention, those were small, if not tiny. And that leads us into a whole nother takeaway. Takeaway number two. Farmers harvest carrots halfway through their lives. This is a thing I just did not know about how carrots grow until researching.

If you're eating the taproot of a carrot plant, you are eating a prematurely killed carrot plant. And their life cycle is actually two entire years. The carrot that we eat is just like the middle of the cycle of this plant. So we're eating them in the middle of the cycle of this plant so like we're we're eating them in the prime of their life so going back to my thing about how you know i i liked baby carrots because i felt like i was killing something innocent um i can still feel pretty good like i'm taking the life force of something that's just cut down on the prime of its life. Yeah, they almost are baby carrots. They're like thriving adult carrots.

Yeah. Before they're old. Hell yeah. Just young and dumb. That's how I like my carrots. Not these gnarled old wizened carrots that taste terrible. That have been jaded by the world. You can taste the bitterness of their...

They've been through a couple of divorces and it's just not... They've lost the ability to trust in people. They've stopped and started smoking like three times. Is the reason that they just taste better kind of why we kill them so young? Yeah, mainly. And it partly comes from why they grow this taproot at all.

The key sources here are the YouTube channel of the University of Wyoming extension, like the ag part. And then also a great video by a farmer named Jag Singh. But the biology of carrots, they are a biennial plant. That means they have a two-year life cycle. And what happens is in year one, there is a very small green plant above the ground and a larger and larger and larger taproot below, a larger and larger, let's think of it as orange part of the plant. And then that taproot, part of why it's so exciting as a food for us is that it's a structure storing a bunch of energy that's ready for harvest after about three months very

quickly. And then in year two, what happens is the taproot's energy gets taken by the whole rest of the plant. And it's focused on growing a much bigger flowery green plant above the ground. Like the ultimate goal, if carrots had minds, the ultimate goal would be, I want to have a bunch of flowers, a bunch of stems, a bunch of seeds to make more carrot plants other places. And the taproot is like an intermediate stage that we just value a lot as humans.

Sounds good. Had no idea that's going on. Yeah. Yeah, and if you left in the ground they turned into these terrifying david cronenberg yeah witch carrots yeah carrot monsters it looks like you like you could go viral pulling up one of these and say these are what carrots look like when grown next to a nuclear power plant or when exposed to 5g 5g tower my carrots look like and it literally is just a carrot from year two of its natural growth stage but it looks like this mutant thing with

tentacles yeah the tentacles like that's also what i was picturing when you're talking about split carrots like being the the imperfect kind that they would turn into baby carrots alex i was picturing like i've definitely seen that sort of you know it always reminds me of witches for some reason because it's like you know uh gnarled gnarled yeah gnarled is the right word that's and i'm gnarly bro i'm so excited for people to see their brief videos if people want to watch or will I'll try to put screen caps in the links because like, there's a thing that farmers, especially amateur farmers have run into where they just keep letting a carrot grow by accident, like they don't harvest it in year one. Taproot becomes crazy. It becomes a much like it's often still a big size, but it turns into a weird pale color. It turns into a much more like wooden texture. It becomes something that is very, very strange looking. We'll have a bunch of beautiful flowers and those have seeds in them. And those seeds are how you can plant new carrots. But if farmers forget to harvest these things, they end up with a,

like a stranger things version of the plants. Like they're like, Oh, this is not fun at all to eat or look at what happened to my thing. I shouldn't have left it cooking in the ground for so long. Yeah. It looks evil. It looks,

it looks like a mistake and something that my God would never allow. I don't know what's going on. Must be asleep at the wheel when it comes to these things because, jeez. Yeah, right.

This would really throw Kirk Cameron. It was like, yeah, God designed it. So you really, really have to pay attention to its life cycle and pull it at the exact right time. Otherwise, it gets super weird and demonic. Yeah. This is why I love the food episodes of this show.

Is that everything we eat, there's nothing natural about this because we have over time figuring out like what's the exact best way to get the part because obviously the carrot's goal in life is not to have us eat its root its goal is to reproduce that we and it's whether you're talking about this whether you're talking about bananas which literally have can only be grown by cloning them because we don't do the seed distribution part at all. And like there's a viral image that goes around the internet every once in a while reminding everybody that there are six different vegetables that are all from actually from the same plant. Yeah.

Cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflower. That's all from the same plant that is just they've each, they've taken the plants and then bred them to emphasize like a different part of their structure to get the biggest fattest cauliflower the biggest fattest broccoli but that's all from the same plant that i cannot pronounce um but yeah i can i could pretend i know it's like brassica oleracea and brassica is part of mustard that came up in the mustard episode so i think it's related to that, too. It's all one thing.

Well, and the thing is that so much of what we call stuff is was literally just named by a corporation at some point. So so they would they would hide that fact by just coming up with some appetizing name for whatever this thing is. They're selling the same way they fooled us all with the baby carrots thing right uh it is it's it is fascinating how most of us don't know what our food would look like if it were allowed to just grow and do its thing as an organism versus as food for us uh because we still same way we look at horses and think of them as transportation rather than organisms. We just look at this. It's like, well, this is the thing that grows cauliflower for us to eat. It's like, well,

yeah, but what, what is the cauliflower from the organism's point of view? Like, why is it growing that? And like with kale, it's like, they said, what's the worst part of this plant that we can let's see what's the most leathery unpleasant yeah that we used to only sell to pizza hut because as the garnish for their pizza bars yeah yeah yeah all these plants i feel like for so many decades just so many of us are not near farms like putting this together i realized when i was watching videos of a guy be like carrot year two it's crazy that's probably the first time i've actually seen carrots harvested out of the ground and And before that, it was Bugs Bunny pulling them out of a cartoon ground and getting yelled at by the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Like, it's not something I'm close to. And then I learned about it from this. It's great. I don't know. You sound like you're pretty educated. That Bugs Bunny story was pretty... I think that's how carrots usually come out of the ground. I also know like three pieces of classical music. So it's pretty good. The ones he did specifically. That's how carrots usually come out of the ground. I also know like three pieces of classical music.

So it's pretty good. The ones he did specifically. That's it. They're mostly about wabbits and barbers. That's the main songs. Those are the main ones. Well, and there's one more takeaway for the main episode here and jumps forward in history. Takeaway number three.

People think carrots improve your vision because of a British World War II PSYOP. Psychological Operation is a PSYOP. This is somewhat scientific. Carrots can support your vision and help maintain it, but

there's a misleading thing the British did to lead people to believe that they give you like night vision superpowers and it's not true but it stuck with us is that still out there the carrots help your eyes i heard that when i was a kid i was like i did too this is the i i don't think i remember hearing it i i think all my memories have been replaced by things we learned while editing cracked articles so i don't even know if i ever believed it i i think all my memories have been replaced by things we learned while editing cracked articles so i don't even know if i ever believed it i just know that it was a belief yeah this is the point where it's jack has got to be like i'm sorry do you know who you're talking to

do you know yeah i just by i've learned I have to just like bite my tongue. Yeah. There is nothing you can debunk for me that I, and in fact, I probably have since found out that the debunking is wrong. I feel like the internet specifically taught me so much about World War II propaganda specifically. Like the internet loves exploring how people in World War II lied to the other side in World War II. It's one of the favorite things of people online. So into it. Yeah. Yeah. But like we have, you've pasted in a piece of, this is from a propaganda campaign, right?

Yeah. Like they intentionally put this out there. Yeah. This was very, this was not like people vaguely hope they could convince people like there were posters printed when that was hard to do in the 1940s. And the key source here is a piece for Smithsonian Magazine, actually, it's a piece by K. Annabelle Smith, and Joel S. Denker's book talks about too. But starting with the myth in in World War Two, Britain's government and military, they fomented a myth that carrots improve your vision and give you stronger night vision. And I'll have a poster linked here. The

text on the top is, night sight can mean life or death. And then there's a picture of a soldier at night. And then the banner says, eat carrots and leafy green or yellow vegetables rich in vitamin A, with huge quotes around the letter A, I don't know why. Essential for night sight. End of quote of poster. And this was not the only poster like this. They put a vibe out there to say, hey, whether you're a soldier or a civilian afraid of bombings, if you eat carrots, it will make you more capable of seeing that stuff coming in the dark yeah but they weren't really putting it out to their people were they they were putting it out

so the germans would hear it they were putting it out as like hey fellow british people there's an advantage we can have but the goal was to fool the germans and this was because the british had a technological advantage. German bombers started attacking England as soon as they conquered France, essentially. And in particular, they attacked at night, which is why some British cities instituted nighttime blackouts. But according to the Smithsonian, quote, the Royal Air Force were able to repel the German fighters in part because of the development of a new secret radar technology, the onboard airborne interception radar, which they nicknamed AI. I'm breaking in here to say AI is not a useful acronym for this. It confuses me. But it was first used by the RAF in 1939.

It had the ability to pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. In 1940, RAF night fighter ace John Cunningham, nicknamed Cat's Eyes, was the first to shoot down an enemy plane using AI. He'd later rack up an impressive total of 20 kills, 19 of which were at night, end quote. I do hope this is the story that this is such a convoluted way to hide your air your your radar advantage like whoever came up with this plan right it's like well let's just tell them that that it's the carrots because they must have found out that german germany didn't have a lot of carrots or something that they couldn't so you know that this is like the difference are we have a lot of carrots here where they hated

carrots in england so yeah so they're like are just like cramming down a vegetable that they hate because they think it's going to give them superpowers. And we're just like the British are just using old cat's eyes and the radar to just shoot them out of the sky. Yeah. That is helping me realize another reason this was silly because like carrots are more of a colder weather northern latitude vegetable like the germans definitely also had carrots oh yeah you would think they would have this advantage too yeah i'm just

picturing like the british people picturing like nazis just tucking into a giant bowl of carrots desperately, just hoping to gain an advantage. I feel like that was at least part of it. Yeah, and to disguise this, they tried to tell their own British people this in order to send the German scientists and experts on a wild goose chase. There is no evidence that this worked, but there is huge evidence that this stuck in the British public's mind. And so then from there, like carrots give you night vision became a trope that a lot of people believe to this day. I certainly do.

I forgot everything you just said and still believe it. I'm in. I don't even turn my lights on when i drive at night because you're in a car full of carrots just yeah those yeah and then it also gave kind of another advantage to british war production and food arranging because carrots were an easy crop for victory gardens to grow in british homes and yards and then carrot desserts were one of the best substitutes for desserts made of sugar because actual sugar was very

tightly rationed. And so psychologically, British people did benefit from believing that the less good carrot desserts that they were eating were also giving them powers. That was just an easier way to smooth things over with real cake not being so available i like carrot cake um i don't think i would like carrot cake if the carrot was the like used as a substitute for sugar i think the thing i like about carrot cake is that like they're like well we put carrots in this so we have to just like absolutely bombard it with sugar like just put so much sugar in it that it is on the verge of just being a sugar cube and at that point we we hold back a little bit but like i think i think that's what i like about it

so the idea that they're like instead of sugar why not try carrots in your chocolate cake let's put it this way if you owned a restaurant or a bakery and you sold carrot cake and if eventually you just decided to try not putting the carrot in there no one would complain or notice as long as it still had like the cream cheese frosting and all the other elements in there it's like no one would ever it's like oh, I can barely taste this thing, barely taste the carrot in this. That's the best, best carrot cake so far. How do you do that?

How do you hide your carrot so well? And then as far as the other source of this misconception, it partly comes from the actual thing where carrots do help you maintain your baseline vision. And this is actually one of the main differences between a purple carrot and an orange carrot. Because carrots have vitamin A in particular because the orange ones have a substance called carotene. And carotene is a pigment containing compounds high in vitamin A. And a 1998 Johns Hopkins study, as reported by the New York Times, found that supplemental pills could reverse poor vision among those with a vitamin A deficiency if you just provided more vitamin A, provided more carotene. And he says that orange and purple carrots have different disease resistances and also different levels of vitamins.

And the orange ones actually have more vitamin A because of that orange color. They have more vitamin A because of the carotene giving them orange color. So there is some vision boost, but mainly in a preventing vitamin deficiency kind of way. It doesn't give you superhuman abilities. In the same way that sucking on a lemon rind is okay for making it so your teeth don't fall out when you're out to sea, but it's not the advised course of giving yourself superpowers. The claim is like if people were like yeah if you have citrus it'll give you huge teeth or like mega teeth right like that's right

the claim the strongest dang gums yeah that's why when you see kind of ridiculous stories like this it's so good that we've moved past that to where now you, you know, that, cause like now we have real superfoods like quinoa, which of course rids your body of, of the toxins that have been put into it, the, and the negative energies that have been put into it by processed foods, um, that we, yeah, we don't believe like these ridiculous myths anymore. I'm just sitting back having some nice raw water. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but out here in LA, people have started drinking raw water, which is just water that hasn't been filtered or cleaned of any of the toxins. I actually don't eat or drink those things because I don't have time to start levitating.

And she releases out of my eyes. So I don't do that. But it makes sense that you guys do that. Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin for another round of SifPod. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com.

E if you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. I already foreshadowed this week's bonus topic. It is Bugs Bunny and his love of carrots. Where that came from. Why it's a thing. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 8 dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring carrots with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, big orange carrots are a relatively recent phenomenon. Takeaway number one, big orange carrots are a relatively recent phenomenon. Takeaway number two, farmers harvest carrots halfway through their lives. And takeaway number three, people think carrots improve your vision because of a British World War II psyop. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Jack O'Brien is on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien, and his podcast is The Daily Zeitgeist, or as it is often said, The Daily Zeitgeist. That's an iHeartRadio podcast. It's available everywhere, available often. There's daily episodes and daily trending episodes every weekday. Jack is also co-host of Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties,

which is a fun new NBA podcast. And Jack makes that with his TDZ co-host Miles Gray. I hope you remember him from last week's show about Tulips. And I hope you are continuing to be interested in the NBA. They have the most interesting offseason of really any American sport, I would say. So it's worth checking out, because you want to know what all the Supermax contracts are going to be. Jason Pargin is at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter. That's the phrase, John dies at the end, minus a letter. Speaking of John dies at the end, Jason has a new book coming.

It's available for pre-order. It's called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. And that book is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. Also stands on its own. Again, that title is If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Pre-order info is going to be on the show links for this and also at Jason's Twitter, at JohnDiesAtTheEN. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And I used a lot of reference materials this week. Those books include The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat

by food historian Joel S. Denker. Also used Vegetables, a Biography, that's a French language book by culture historian Evelyn Bloch-Dano, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan into my language English. Next book is Food, a culinary history from antiquity to the present that's edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. Oh, those two. And then tons more resources from the internet, in particular the YouTube channel of the University of Wyoming Extension, a Smithsonian magazine piece by K. Annabelle Smith.

Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with episode 100 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. you