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In March 2008, we began receiving an e-mailed heads-up cautioning consumers that what we call baby carrots are actually deformed (crooked) regular carrots that have been whittled down and marinated in chlorine: It is true some food products labeled as baby carrots are made by cutting down larger roots, and that these items can be treated with chlorine during processing. However, it's not true there's anything wrong with the larger carrots they're made from, or that the resultant vegetables reach consumers in a chlorine-soaked state. Most baby-cut versions are no longer made from imperfect larger carrots, although the motivation for the invention of this product was an initial desire to find a use for standard-sized carrots that otherwise would have had to be discarded: The carrots now used to make baby-cut carrots are typically ones that have been specially bred to contain more sugar than their standard-sized cousins, because this extra sweetness appeals more strongly to children. Likewise, their bright orange color has also been bred into them, as has the evenness of that color all the way through the root: As an antimicrobial treatment to minimize or reduce the contamination of the finished product, cocktail carrots can be treated with chlorine. Those that are so treated are subsequently rinsed with potable water to remove the excess chlorine before packaging: According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the use of chlorine as an antimicrobial treatment is a current accepted practice in the processing for all fresh-cut ready-to-eat vegetables (see Section 4.4). As for the white film the e-mailed alert claims is the chlorine coming to the surface, that white blush is caused by dehydration of the cut surface — were you to pull a carrot from your own garden, slice it in half and place it in your refrigerator, it too would manifest that same whitish appearance on the cut portion once the carrot dried out a bit. Cocktail carrots are more prone to develop this only because their entire surface area is a cut surface. To keep cocktail carrots from drying out, store them at low temperature and in a high relative humidity environment. Baby-cuts are part of a sharp upsurge in the carrot's popularity in the U.S. Between 1970 and 1986, Americans ate 6 pounds of carrots per person per year. However, American consumption of carrots began to take off in 1987, and by 2002 it had reached 11 pounds per person. Baby carrot products are now among the most popular produce items in the supermarket aisle, have surpassed potatoes and celery, according to a 2007 USDA report. To make baby-cuts, large sweet carrots are machine cut into 2-inch sections, then abraded (scraped) down to size, their ends rounded by the same process: Generally, consumers can determine whether small carrots are true baby carrots or not by looking at what's listed on the packaging. Labels that say baby carrots appear on packages of very young carrots that are harvested while the vegetables are still quite tiny. Labels that proclaim baby-cut carrots appear on packages of petite carrots made by chopping down and polishing much larger versions of the vegetable.
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