Carrot

A carrot is a root. That means the orange part you eat grew underground, in the dark, the whole time. You have never seen a carrot growing. Nobody has. Only the leaves stick up into the light, like a green flag that says something is happening down here.

The carrot plant made that root as its pantry. It spent all summer catching sunlight with its leaves and squeezing the sunshine down into the root as sugar, saving up for next year. That’s why carrots are sweet. A carrot is sunshine, stored in a cellar.

When you pull a carrot, the whole plant comes with it. You can’t pick a carrot the way you pick an apple and leave the tree waving. Pulling it is the end of the plant — it gave its whole pantry to you. (The plant made it to live on, and we take the savings. That’s true of a lot of the vegetables in your kitchen.)

Growing a carrot takes hardly anything from the world — people who measure these things say a carrot is one of the lightest foods there is. If foods had backpacks, a carrot’s would be nearly empty.

And carrots weren’t always orange. Long ago most were purple or white. Orange carrots got popular a few hundred years ago and simply never gave the job back.