Carrot references can be found in many part of the arts and sciences. Carrots have been included in several major works of art and helped in identifying species in the 16th century using the paintings of the Dutch masters.

See some magnificent examples of fine art depicting carrots here.

Carrots are one of the rare vegetables which are more nutritious cooked than raw, find out why here.  And when cooked whole!

Carrots are more nutritious when cut by a knife! - read here.

Carrots can make a material as strong as carbon fibre! - read here

And a new Formula 3 Racing Car with a carrot steering wheel! - here

In the US a typical carrot has to travel 1,838 miles to reach your dinner table! (Source: Pirog, Rich, and Andrew Benjamin. "Checking the Food Odometer: Comparing Food Miles for Local Versus Conventional Produce Sales in Iowa Institutions." Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, July 2003. http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/files/food_travel072103.pdf)

There is a real Carrot Tree, native to Madeira - here - While most members of the Apiaceae are herbaceous, a few are woody, such as this Tree Carrot, Monizia edulis, which is endemic to the Island of Madeira. It is fairly common for families that are predominantly herbaceous to have woody representatives on oceanic islands.  Photo here.

A Carrot contains chemicals to help it stay healthy - here   Bugs Bunny Car - here

The 1551 edition of the "Libro de Agricultura" by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera records the "colour of oranges" to describe carrots.

One of the first written evidences of an orange carrot, particularly written in English (and therefore cannot be misinterpreted during translation) is Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis – A Catalogue of plants in the Physical Garden at Edinburgh by James Sutherland intendent of said garden in 1683. 

This work makes reference to Orange, Red, Yellow and White carrots, together with the common Wild Carrot. It and also distinguishes them from Parsnip as a separate plant. See extract here). This is a very useful record as it shows what actually existed in the botanic garden in Edinburgh.

DID YOU KNOW:

 - Carrot juice is used for many things besides drinking. Ed Ruscha, who is a master printer and artist uses carrot juice instead of printer ink. He has also printed with spinach juice, chocolate and strawberries.  Read more about Ed Ruscha here. Read more about the wonder and health benefits of Carrot Juice here.

- a pyramid of carrots containing 3 tons of carrots would be approximately 4 feet square and 4 feet tall.  If we take the estimate of 27,500 carrots as 3 toms, and assume an average volume of 1.2 cubic inches for each carrot, then the base of a square pyramid would be approximately 4 feet by 4 feet. The height would be nearly the same. This assumes the carrots on the base are laid out in one direction and alternated for each successive layer.  Calculations from Bolthouse Carrots!

Here are Trivia Nos 1 to 45:

	The Wild Carrot is called Queen Anne's Lace. Click here to find out why.
	The World Longest Carrot recorded in 2007 was 5.839 metres (19 feet 1 7/8 inches)  - Joe Atherton, UK
	The World  Heaviest Carrot recorded in 1998 was 18.985 lb (8.61kg) (single root mass) John V. R. Evans, USA See World records page here.
	The Biggest collection in the world - Romana. See her own pages here.
	There is a carrot pie flavour jelly bean!
	Both of the words in "Daucus Carota" mean orange.
	Carrots were first grown as a medicine not a food. History starts here
	The average person will consume 10,866 carrots in a lifetime see photo here
	The Ancient Greeks called carrots "Karoto"
	Carrots, like other food, are travelling nearly 60 per cent further on the UK roads than in the 1970s - read more
	Carrots flowers are also called Birds nest, Bees nest and the Devils Plague
	Carrots produce more distilled spirit than potatoes.
	Le Roi Carotte is an 1872 operetta by Offenbach photo here
	The crisp texture of carrots is the result of the cell walls being stiffened with the indigestible food fibres cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.
	Tobacconists in France used to put a carrot in their bins to keep their tobacco from drying out.
	Jeff Chiplis, from Cleveland has a collection of over 10,000 carrot items.  See his own page - click here.
	The Japanese word for carrot is "ninjin"!
	In early Celtic literature, the carrot is referred to as the "Honey Underground"!
	Yes there is a carrot beetle! more here.
	The classic Bugs Bunny carrot is the "Danvers" type.
	It's a myth that Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots - he simply did not like them More details here.
	Carrots are not always orange and can also be found in purple, white, red or yellow.  More information here.
	Carrots were the first vegetable to be canned commercially. Napoleon! - read more here.
	Carrots might unlock the secrets of the universe. More detail here.
	The carrot belongs to the family Umbelliferae.
	If you dug a hole to the Earth's center and dropped a Baby Carrot in it, it'd take 42 minutes to get to the bottom.
	Carrots have one of  the highest content of beta carotene (vitamin A) of all vegetables.
	The cultivated variety is classified as Daucus carota, variety sativa.
	You get between 175,000 and 450,000 seeds in a pound - a teaspoon can hold approximately 2000!
	The Americans know the wild carrot as Queen Anne's Lace, wild carrot, rattlesnake weed & American carrot.
	The carrot is a member of the parsley family including species such as celery, parsnip, fennel, dill and coriander.
	If your first name is Carrot it has made you happiest when you are expressing in some creative, artistic way, and not conforming to strict routine. Find out more.
	Holtville, California dubs itself "The Carrot Capital of the World." with an Annual Festival, now in its 60th year. Check out more here.  Other carrot festivals around the world - here
	The Anglo-Saxons included carrots as an ingredient in a medicinal drink against the devil and insanity.
	The Greek foot soldiers who hid in the Trojan Horse were said to have consumed ample quantities of raw carrots to inactivate their bowels.
	The above is unlikely to be true. The Trojan Horse is a mythological tale and carrots are GOOD for constipation, so would have the opposite effect, or did they eat lot of carrots before the fight to clear their intestines and avoid any problems during the important moment??  another apocryphal tale.
	The Ancient Greeks called the plant Philtron or Bird's Nest.
	There is a real Carrot Tree, native to Madeira - here
	Gentlemen in Teheran in the 1870's took carrots stewed in sugar as an aphrodisiac to increase the quality and quantity of sperm!
	Believe it or not School in the Uk were given official instructions on how to eat carrots! - click here.
	In Suffolk, Carrots were formerly given as a specific for preserving and restoring the wind of horses.
	In August 2005 Ozlem Aydin wrote a thesis on the mathematical analysis of peeling of carrots, to the graduate school of natural and applied sciences of middle east technical university as part of the requirement for a Masters Degree in Food Engineering.
	Fuel for Cars? Scientists now believe that bio fuels will be the answer to our energy needs when the oil runs out. One such fuel, perhaps within 10 years, will be carrots - it would take approximately 6000 carrots to drive one mile.
	A strong decoction of carrot and root make a very good insecticide.
	You get 10 mg of Vitamin A from 20 average carrots. If you dream of carrots - it portends prosperity and health; for a young woman to eat them denotes she will contract an early marriage and be the mother of several hardy children!!
	The Victorians had a recipe to destroy crickets – a paste of flour, powdered arsenic, and scraped carrots, placed near their habitations. This was developed because it was discivered that crickets were very fond of carrots. (Magazine of domestic economy, volume iv, 1839)

Next 100 + trivias (now opens on a new page - trivia listings)

Is a Carrot a Vegetable or Fruit?

In the European Union Jam Directive, written in the 80s and updated in 2001, it describes the parameters required for a product to be labelled as jam or marmalade and from which the UK Jam and Similar Products legislation is based, there is the phrase "for the purposes of this directive, tomatoes, the edible part of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water melons are considered to be fruit". This was introduced to pacify the Portuguese who are strongly into Carrot Marmalade!

Of course carrots are not biologically a fruit as they do not carry the seeds, and the above paragraph in the jam directive does not reclassify them as such, just allows them to be used as fruit.

Duerrs, the famous British Jam maker does not use any carrots in their products, although many years ago they did try carrot jam and tomato jam. It is recalled that this was to try out what the products would taste like due to the above mentioned in the jam directive. The unanimous conclusion at the time was that tomato jam was actually very nice but carrot jam was awful! Try this Carrot Jam Recipe.

Marmalade is a curiously British term, marmalade means a jam made with citrus fruit. The term was fought over in the European Community as other countries wanted to do away with it or change its meaning. Marmalade contains citrus fruit (sometimes with something else like ginger or ) and is usually characterised by the cut of the peel. Marmalade is thought to have originated in Portugal, where quinces (marmelo) were cooked with sugar to make a preserve. The British were the first to add the peel back to orange marmalade, to make the preserve set instead of using apple juice, hence the British tradition of orange marmalade.

Carrot is definitely a vegetable. Though vegetable is strictly a culinary term, and open to mis-interpretation. Carrot Marmalade Recipe here.

The Peruvian Carrot

The arracacha (also know as Peruvian carrot) ( Arracacia xanthorriza ) is a garden root vegetable originally from the Andes, somewhat intermediate between the carrot and celery and related to them. Its starchy taproot is a popular food item in South America, especially in Brazil where it is a major commercial crop. The name arracacha (or racacha ) was borrowed into Spanish from Quechua, and is used in the Andean region. The plant is also called apio criollo (" Creole celery") in Venezuela, zanahoria blanca ("white carrot") in Ecuador, virraca in Peru, and mandioquinha ("little cassava") or batata-baroa in Brazil. It is sometimes called white carrot in English, but that name properly belongs to white varieties of the common carrot. The leaves are similar to parsley, and vary from dark green to purple. The roots resemble fat short carrots, with lustrous off-white skin. The interior may be white, yellow, or purple.

• Much of this increase in food mileage is due to the centralisation of our food distribution systems. Most carrots are sold through the major supermarkets. The major retailers have around 76 per cent of the market share for fresh produce and 63 per cent of shoppers buy their fruit and vegetables from supermarkets.

• Research by SAFE Alliance into carrot prices shows that although the supermarkets have more purchasing power than other retailers, savings are not passed on to the customer. The research also found that smaller retailers such as greengrocers and street markets can often provide locally grown carrots at a very similar price to the supermarket's carrots from further away.

• Direct sales from the producer to the consumer are one way of reducing the distance our food travels, of increasing the likelihood that it is really fresh, and of creating a dialogue between farmers and consumers about the farming of our countryside.

• Buy loose rather than pre-packed carrots, as pre-packed carrots are bulkier and cause more transport pollution as well as using more packing materials.

• Buy local carrots direct from farm shops, farmers' markets or a box scheme. The Soil Association (tel 0117 929 0661) produces a list of such local food schemes.