Carrots in Literature

Trivia 2 which gives examples of the carrot in the Arts and Sciences together with some fascinating "rock art" discovered by Brian Lee in America. Here you will also find the famous icy sparks microwave effect explained, and examples of carrot tattoos. Carrots can make antifreeze and see if carrots could unlock the mysteries of the universe!
Were Carrots the first step in cloning? and so much more .........

Carrots have been mentioned in many literary works, and here are several located by the World Carrot Museum.

Mae West "I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond,"

Fran Lebowitz in Metropolitan Life (1978) "Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter."

Will Rogers (1879-1935) "Some guy invented Vitamin A out of a carrot. I'll bet he can't invent a good meal out of one."

Will Rogers (again) "An onion can make people cry but there has never been a vegetable to make people laugh"

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian author, playwright. "You ask What is life? That is the same as asking, What is a carrot; A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.

J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) “But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.”

John Robinson Jeffers (1187-1962) "Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice."

Pliny the Elder, a Roman Historian and scientist said:

"There is one kind of wild pastinaca which grows spontaneously; by the Greeks it is known as staphylinos. Another kind is grown either from the root transplanted or else from seed, the ground being dug to a very considerable depth for the purpose. It begins to be fit for eating at the end of the year, but it is still better at the end of two; even then, however, it preserves its strong pungent flavour, which it is found impossible to get rid of." - It was the Carrot.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) "The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution."

Nicholos Culpeper (1653) said of carrots that "Wild carrots belong to Mercury, and expel wind and remove stitches in the side, promote the flow of urine and women's courses, and break and expel the stone; the seed has the same effect and is good for dropsy, and those whose bowels are swollen with wind: It cures colic, stone, and rising of the mother; being taken in wine or boiled in wine and taken, it helpeth conception. The leaves being applied with honey to running sores or ulcers cleanse them; I suppose the seeds of them perform this better than the roots: and though Galen recommended garden carrots highly to expel wind, yet they breed it first, and we may thank nature for expelling it, not they; for the seeds of them expel wind and so mend what the root marreth."

Greek Physician Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-c. 90) wrote "Ye root ye thickness of a finger, a span long, sweet-smelling, edible being sodden [boiled]. Of this ye seed being drank...and it is good for ye [painful discharge of urine] in potions, and for ye bitings and strokes of venomous beasts; they say also, that they which take it before hand shall take no wrong of wilde beasts. It co-operates also to conception, and it also being [diuretic], both provoketh [poison], and being applied; but the leaves being beaten small with honey, and laid on, doth cleanse rapidly spreading destructive ulceration of soft tissues."

Evans and Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV:1). -

"Remember, William," says Sir Hugh Evans, "Focative is Caret," "and that" replies Mrs. Quickly, "is a good root."

"The man in the moon drinks claret,
But he is a dull Jack-a-dandy;
Would he know a sheep's head from a Carrot
He should learn to drink cider and brandy."
Song of Mad Tom in _Midsummer Night's Dream.

Richard Gardiner in Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens (1599) "Sowe Carrets in your Gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing."

Irena Chalmers in "The Great Food Almanac". Eating a carrot a day is "like signing a life insurance policy"

An old Polish saying " If your husband is old and weak you must have him to drink the juice from two big carrots and one firm celery."

John Stolarczyk (1950-?) "Remember a carrot is for life not just for Christmas"; "Gardeners never die then simply throw in the trowel"; "They are not all locked up yet".

Shel Silverstein What did the carrot say to the wheat? Lettuce rest, I'm feeling beet.

Seen in a health food store: "Shoplifters will be beaten over the head with an organic carrot."

La Rochefoucauld (1665) "To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art."

Dr. Francis Peyre Porcher, in "Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests," 1863"...the root is edible, and possesses more aroma than any of our indigenous plants. It is used in spasmodic vomiting, flatulent colics, and nervous headaches."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C. - 65 A.D.) "Even the most frugal man has to spend a fortune on dinner. The same amount that is spent on the gullet is considered disgraceful, unless it's for official honors, when it's beyond reproach."

Voltaire "The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease."

Ginette Olivesi-Lorenzi, as quoted by Coleman Andrews "To read about a country's cuisine isn't simply to go looking for good things; it is also to better know by means of the recipes, the customs and the richness or poverty of a place, and the spirit of those who inhabit it. It is, above all, to participate in the symbolic celebration of the shared repast."

AntoineLavoisier - 1700 - (the father of nutrition) "It is easy to foresee that other than the secretion of bile, or rather through the secretion of bile, an organ as important in size, connections and vascular structures as the liver fills a whole system of functions, the extent of which science has not yet grasped."

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), American Architect "Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity."

H J Heinz - 1890, "Heart power is stronger than Horsepower."

John Kenneth Galbraith, "More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."

Anon "Let my words, like vegetables, be tender and sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat them."

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine said "Let food be your medicine and medicine your food."

Ludwig Feuerbach, (German Philosopher 1850) "We are what we eat."

George Bernard Shaw "Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

Mahatma Gandhi "The earth has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE) My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882) "Weed - a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

Chinese Proverb "He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician."

Quintilianus, Instituitio oratoria Non ut edam vivo, sed vivam edo. I do not live to eat, but eat to live.

Chief Seattle Native American Indian Chief "Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the Earth is our Mother. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the Sons of the Earth. If men spit upon the ground they spit upon themselves.

All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the Sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web he does to himself …. to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on his creator."

They must not oversalt the leg; and then, if it is not oversalted, and if it is very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils ours, and eaten very moderately of, with a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip, I do not consider it unwholesome.

I was a dull black, so he called me Darkie; then he would give me a piece of bread, which was very good, and sometimes he brought a carrot for my mother.

This man’s allowance was thirty-two shillings a week, and besides his wife he had two children, one aged two years and five months and the other ten months. Here is the list: ( carrots and onions - 4 pence)

Had she expected to see the fascinating stranger so soon again? I think she had. Her big eyes said as much, as, furtively looking up at Mr. Walker’s face, they caught his looks; and then bouncing down again towards her plate, pretended to be very busy in looking at the boiled beef and carrots there displayed. She blushed far redder than those carrots, but her shining ringlets hid her confusion together with her lovely face.

Extract from Act 1 ESTRAGON: (violently). I'm hungry! VLADIMIR: Do you want a carrot? (and subsequent references)

It was littered with scraps of carrot, shreds of green stuff, and indescribable filth.

there the sorry, useless stuff lay; I had no more manner of business for it; and often thought with myself that I would have given a handful of it for a gross of tobacco-pipes; or for a hand-mill to grind my corn; nay, I would have given it all for a sixpenny-worth of turnip and carrot seed out of England, or for a handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink.

I think we must chuck it up and apologize to old Carrots.

The Essays by Sir Francis Bacon

Then consider what victual or esculent things there are, which grow speedily, and within the year; as parsnips, carrots, turnips, onions, radish, artichokes of Hierusalem, maize, and the like.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

So now my lord and lady duke and duchess, here is your governor Sancho Panza, who in the bare ten days he has held the government has come by the knowledge that he would not give anything to be governor, not to say of an island, but of the whole world; and that point being settled, kissing your worships' feet, and imitating the game of the boys when they say, 'leap thou, and give me one,' I take a leap out of the government and pass into the service of my master Don Quixote; for after all, though in it I eat my bread in fear and trembling, at any rate I take my fill; and for my part, so long as I'm full, it's all alike to me whether it's with carrots or with partridges.

I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew-- it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region of the pit.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

"--"Then," says she, "I believe there is a piece of cold buttock and carrot, which will fit you.

said the hoarse gentleman, who was driving his donkey in a truck, with a carrot for a whip.

Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or the Brick.

When a boy gets weak and ill and don't relish his meals, we give him a change of diet--turn him out, for an hour or so every day, into a neighbour's turnip field, or sometimes, if it's a delicate case, a turnip field and a piece of carrots alternately, and let him eat as many as he likes.

Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular--Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud--who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the fingers.

It never occurred to Tom, when Maud sat watching him with her face full of wistfulness, that she wanted to be petted as much as ever he did in his neglected boyhood, or that when he called her "Pug" before people, her little feelings were as deeply wounded as his used to be, when the boys called him "Carrots." He was fond of her in his fashion, but he did n't take the trouble to show it, so Maud worshipped him afar off, afraid to betray the affection that no rebuff could kill or cool.

The feast consisted of a pot-au-feu, which Miss Chalice had made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and brought round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes, and the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried carrots were her specialty); and this was to be followed by poires flambees, pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had volunteered to make.

Early in the morning and late in the fading twilight and on all the days Colin and Mary did not see him, Dickon worked there planting or tending potatoes and cabbages, turnips and carrots and herbs for his mother.

I went into the garden; there I found Cross-patch and Suck-suck rooting up carrots.

Horticulture seemed, however, to have been abandoned in the deserted kitchen-garden; and where cabbages, carrots, radishes, pease, and melons had once flourished, a scanty crop of lucerne alone bore evidence of its being deemed worthy of cultivation.

Adam Bede by George Eliot

It doesn't cost him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions?

A Connecticut Yankee by Mark Twain

Then what did you grate the carrots on? This was an airy slim boy in shrimp-coloured tights that made him look like a forked carrot, the rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles; and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed pink satin cap tilted complacently over his ear.

At last, an empty cab turned up (it is a street where, as a rule, and when they are not wanted, empty cabs pass at the rate of three a minute, and hang about, and get in your way), and packing ourselves and our belongings into it, and shooting out a couple of Montmorency's friends, who had evidently sworn never to forsake him, we drove away amidst the cheers of the crowd, Biggs's boy shying a carrot after us for luck.

The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so, likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas, and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighbourhood.

Anne Of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

"Well, they didn't pick you for your looks, that's sure and certain," was Mrs. Rachel Lynde's emphatic comment. Mrs. Rachel was one of those delightful and popular people who pride themselves on speaking their mind without fear or favor. "She's terrible skinny and homely, Marilla. Come here, child, and let me have a look at you. Lawful heart, did any one ever see such freckles? And hair as red as carrots!

'Keep your mouth shut, Miss Smith; they're as yellow as carrots!' across a table, mind you. To me she's always been civility itself.

There was a half-eaten raw carrot on the table near him.

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a carrot.

The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac

A man here and there was gnawing a frozen carrot, with a kind of animal satisfaction expressed in his face; and thunderous snores came from generals who lay muffled up in ragged cloaks.

The Valley of the Moon by Jack London

There was a pretty garden around the house, where blue trees and blue flowers grew in abundance and in one place were beds of blue cabbages, blue carrots and blue lettuce, all of which were delicious to eat.

Beside him, an unrolled bundle showed itself as consisting of a ragged overcoat and containing an empty and smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and battered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown paper and evidently begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been run over in the street by a wagon-wheel, three greenish- cankered and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun with a mouthful bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as was made patent by the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.

He took me up the open space, between the caves and the river, and into the forest beyond, where, in a grassy place among the trees, we made a meal of stringy-rooted carrots.

And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.

The Road to Oz by Frank L Baum

The place was a sort of store-house; containing bags of potatoes and baskets of carrots, onions and turnips.

Volcanic Vegetables - Carrots By Cynthia Gallaher Chicago USA

I never guessed there were volcanoes in Illinois,
until I found them in my own garden.
Now, it happens every fall,
when I’m led to tall crater tops
issuing feathery green smoke.

I dig around gently in pitch-black earth
and touch something just beneath the surface,
where emerges the orange-hot lava of carrots
urged out in thick, hearty bunches.
I always make sure to wear gloves.

It’s rumored carrots are good for the eyes,
yet who can’t help but see their radiance
when garden work is done
and twilight duskiness rises
like a dark mountain.

No matter how cold and crisp to the touch,
the carrots glow
like candles in my basket,
as they lead me up the
backstairs of my house.

I wash away a layer of mud and
pretend the carrots have been waiting all summer
to be released from their ebony underworld,
from their earthly wrap,
to their full expression on my brazen stove.

I slice each root,
carrot circles wink approval,
and the steamer collects a cache
which I cook and am paid
in richly colored coins to do so.

After dinner, I toss one from my plate
back into the earth for good luck.
Soon, the curling autumn fog rolls in, followed by winter snows,
cooling this upheaval of golden abundance
in layers of chalky ash.

The Carrot By E Pasquill.
Up in Ohakune, amongst the rocks and snow, How they grow the finest carrots, I’m sure you’d like to know, The earth is very fertile, The temperatures are cold, These are some of the secrets that grow Ohakune gold. The Ohakune carrot is sold throughout the land,	And now from what they tell me, they sell millions in Japan. With its vitamins and minerals, this vege is a treat, Caramelised or roasted, mashed up with a swede, The taste is just fantastic, I’m sure you will agree, Next time you’re in Ohakune, a sample you must taste, Of the Ohakune carrot, in a lovely carrot cake.