Welcome to Brainstuff, the production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bol obam here. From baby carrots to microgreens, we humans are enamored of tiny vegetables. But then we have a long history of fascination with things of diminutive scale, from Egyptian tomb artisans to modern miniacs, that is, people who make, collect or appreciate tiny versions of everyday objects.
There's evidence dating back to the third millennium BC of Egyptian tombs outfitted with dinky models of livestock, boats and
furniture in an effort to ensure a comfy afterlife. By the fourteen hundreds, miniature portraits had become all the rage, with painters creating images around just three inches or seven centimeters wide, and in the sixteen hundreds, German dollhouses complete with pots and pans, became popular as informative playthings, an idea that bloomed in the seventeen hundreds as wealthy English families commissioned itty bitty replicas of their own homes outfitted
with itty bitty family heirlooms. Somewhere along the way, our fascination with things in miniature came to include Etsy bitsy vegetables too. The aforementioned baby carrots and microgreen's yes, along with baby corn and similarly infantilized squash, are all commonplace today everywhere, from fresh produce aisles and frozen meals to take out and fancy restaurant fair alike. So why do
we love baby vegetables? Mary White, a Boston University anthropologist, said in an interview with New York Magazine in in terms of our psycho emotional relationship to tiny things, I think it relates to the way you feel when you're in a cathedral. The enormity and intricate detail of the space are all inspiring, and humans can experience a flipped version of that awe when looking at meticulously reproduced tiny things. That something can be that small is a wonder. But
where do those tiny vegetables come from? It turns out a veggie packaged, sold, or served as a baby may actually be a young vegetable, or it may not. It's also entirely possible that a baby vegetable is a dwarf or hybrid version of a full sized vegetable. Take, for example, those adorable little ears of corn that show up in some of your favorite American Chinese dishes. Baby corn, also known as corn letts, truly are just baby ears of regular corn. The corn is harvested at an immature stage
from nearly any variety of regular sized corn plant. Typically once an ear designated to be baby corn reaches up to four inches that's around ten centimeters in length, and it's about half an inch or a little over a centimeter in diameter. It's picked from there. It can be par cooked, in canned, pickled, or frozen, or sold fresh in local markets. Baby back choi is another young vegetable
that's harvested early for its tender and mild quality. However, there are also dwarf varieties of mock baby bok choy that have a similar looking taste to their early harvested adolescent cousins. Another specially developed varietal led to the debut of baby broccoli, also commonly called broccolini in the early nineties. This baby veggie is the offspring of regular sized broccoli
and guy lawn Chinese plant with similar qualities. Broccolini, like a lot of vegetable youngsters, is known for its tenderness and bite sized presentation. Size can also be determined by the way of vegetable has grown. Baby artichokes and regular size artichokes come from the same type of plant. They're even harvested at the same time. The difference in size lies in the fact that the baby version is grown in the shade, while the regular version is grown in
the sun. But what about baby carrots? The name applies to two entirely different things. Some baby carrots are harvested early to create delicate, finger sized edibles, and a few varieties are genetically predisposed to dibunitive size. But some baby carrots aren't babies at all. They're chopped door whittled down from regular sized carrots. So when did growers start whittling carrots down into smooth, skinless, miniature versions of regular carrots.
The idea is generally credited to a California carrot farmer named Mike Urasak, whose operation needed a way to deal with the daily loss of four hundred tons of carrots that were too misshapen to fit into the bags his company used for retail sale. Your sack experimented with peeling and shaping a few bags of crooked carrots into a baby size and sent them to a customer. A grocery
chain that almost immediately demanded more. The process was later industrialized, using machines to cut, peel, grind, and polish the carrots into bite sized form. The advent of the too bite perfectly sculpted baby cut carrot grew the United States carrot consumption by leaps and bounds. In seven one year after they hit the marketplace, people were buying thirty more carrots.
A decade later, the average American was eating a hundred and seventeen percent more carrots than before and estimated fourteen pounds that's six and the third kilos per year. By the two thousands, the baby carrot had come to dominate the fresh cut vegetable category. It's fairly easy to tell the difference between a carrot that's naturally small and one that's cut larger. Carrots ground down to baby carrot size are labeled baby cut, while carrots that have been harvested
in their infancy are labeled baby carrots. There are about fifty different types of vegetables that are grown or imported as miniatures in the United States. Baby squash look improbably perfect in miniature. They're one or two inch that's two and a half to five centimeter round vegetables with scalloped edges and delicate green, white or yellow skin. Some are harvested so young that their embryonic flowers are still intact,
decrying a gentle and conscientious picking. Microgreens, the tender, young leafy plants that often appear on salad plates, are produced year round, and baby lettuces specifically come in a number of varieties, from romaine green leaf and iceberg to the dark red hue of red royal oak leaf lettuce. Harvested early, these greens contain the same nutritional composition as their older counterparts,
but are known for their tender and delicate nature. Today's episode is based on the article so That's where baby veggies come from on House to works dot Com, written by laure L Dove. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klein. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It