#403 Carrot Take

As I’ve mentioned before, part of my eat-five-servings-of-vegetables-and-fruit a day regimen is to eat about three fingers of baby-peeled carrots. I’m not sure what that is in ounces but that’s how much of a ziplock sandwich bag the carrots fill up. Frankly, I have a hard time meeting the five servings quota. Maybe if I cut back on the carrots I could work in a Brussels sprout or two and get closer—not that I would ever subject my delicate palate to a Brussels sprout. Baby carrots are fine but baby cabbages suck. I have one of those tongues with a greater-than-normal quantity of bitter-oriented tastebuds so I’m more sensitive to the bitterness in certain foods and beverages. Can’t drink coffee without sugar, can’t eat grapefruits, can’t abide Brussels sprouts. I even have a hard time being around someone who likes Brussels sprouts. I wonder if E-Harmony dot com has that as one of their compatibility factors. Do you like Brussels sprouts? You do? He doesn’t. Next. It’s funny I would be so sensitive to bitter things. I’m not a bitter person. I’m not sure what I am. I’m not really an optimist. Too much world has beaten that out of me. And for a while I was gonna jump on the pessimism bandwagon but I was afraid it would break down. Maybe I’m a romantic. I like to believe things will be good, but I sort of know it’s a pipe dream. So that’s why I’m a little miffed at my carrots. They make up a huge portion of my daily diet. Half my lunch to be exact. My baggie full of carrots and my Braeburn apple and lunch is done. And since I only eat a breakfast bar/snack bar thingy for breakfast I can eat anything in any quantity I want for dinner. But by that time my stomach’s so shrunk I can’t eat too much of that anyhow. Where was I? Oh yeah, starving. And thinking about the inconsistency in taste in my little factory-milled carrots. I don’t remember carrots tasting so bad when I grew up. And these carrots I buy are organic carrots too. You’d think it would be pesticides that make a carrot bitter. But no. Apparently, it’s other carrots trying to extract nutrients from the some un-chemically fertilized soil. Cause about every fifth carrot in the population is bitter as a widow with a lapsed life insurance policy. And it’s that weird organic bitter too. Like someone let the horses loose in the carrot patch. And they’d been drinking too much coffee. The thing is, the package proclaims that each and every one of these delectable mini-peeled carrots is crunchy, sweet, and ready to eat. Well, as any baseball hitter will tell you, two out of three ain’t bad. What are you going to do? Take back every carrot that’s bitter. Hardly. They got you. As long as they keep the bad ones to a smallish percentage, most people will go right on buying them. Cause that’s life. There’s always bad stuff. The secret is to keep down the percentage. Hey. That’s it. Maybe I’m a percentage-ist.
America, ya gotta love it.