Where Do Baby Vegetables Come From?

From snack-sized carrots to miniature artichokes, we love li'l veggies -- and have a number of ways to produce them. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/where-do-baby-veggies-come-from.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:47):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:56):
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.

(03:17):
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

(03:40):
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

(04:00):
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

(04:21):
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,

(04:46):
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.

(05:06):
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

(05:27):
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

(05:49):
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

(06:11):
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

(06:33):
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