Day 59:
The thing about carrots is that supermarket carrots are short and bright orange and sweet, and the rest aren’t.
Not all carrots are orange. Not all carrots are sweet. Not all orange carrots are sweet. Not all carrots are tiny things. My grandmother told me the carrots we call carrots today were called “baby carrots” in her childhood, and they were the smallest sweetest ones, or in some places, the sweetest part of the carrot carved out of the middle of a bigger not-as-sweet carrot.
Since I’m not a botanist, I’m not even sure that the things I’m eating and calling carrots are carrots. Scratch that — I’m on a foreign world that to my knowledge, while populated by humanoids, didn’t necessarily get populated by Earth humans, so these are almost definitely exactly not biologically like carrots.
On the other hand, they’re orange (or white or red or yellow, I’ve found a bunch of varieties) and can grow as long as half my forearm, and pack a pretty good calorie punch when you’re really hungry. They don’t go moldy in the cave, in fact they sort of like the humid muddiness in here. And they haven’t killed me yet, though if I eat too many in one day they do strange things to the color of my… output.
Still, they’re not sweet. They’re ruddy or dirty or russety and I have to cook the hell out of them to get rid of the bitterness They make a decent bread, but not a decent cake.
I miss sugar.
