Children who still live at home and are supported and fed by their parents must immediately stop reading this article, for there is information here that will damage your parental relationships. Turn away, I say. Look no further.
Are they gone?
All right. Here goes—a bold and unequivocal statement: I cannot abide cooked carrots and henceforth and forthwith I will refuse to sully my dinners with them. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise the lard and pass the salt.
And while we’re at it, the same goes for cooked peas, particularly those tiny, shrivelled frozen green horrors, or the nastiest crime against food ever — canned mushed peas. What sadistic, taste-hating monster came up with that idea? I don’t want to point fingers, but I think there’s a certain leaf-wearing green tyrant who happily claims responsibility. “Ho ho ho,” indeed. Nice. Steal Santa’s signature line and then force us to eat sludge. But I will not have it. No sir, and good day to you and the little sprout.
In fact, I just completed a highly scientific research project that proves that cooked carrots are 100 per cent the devil’s root vegetable. My methodology was fool proof—I posted to my Facebook page that cooked carrots were an abomination and anyone whose opinion I valued agreed with me. I think that says it all right there.
But for years, I not only choked the day-glo orange, gag-reflexive awfulness down, I prepared them for my own children and insisted they eat them. Why? Because my mother used to make me eat them—with a serving of guilt on the side because lucky children on the other side of the world didn’t have to eat carrots cooked to the consistency of ketchup (another “food” perversion). For the record, my mother also fed me liver, buttermilk, lima beans, ambrosia salad and tomato aspic (although, to be fair, tomato aspic is actually delicious; it’s just such an unfortunately named side dish that I refuse to ever ask for it). I remember the horrible day when I saw pig’s feet—pardon me—ham hocks on the counter with the growing awareness that she somehow planned to make a meal out of them. I can only be grateful that several generations between her and Scotland had come and gone so that we needn’t endure haggis. (No offense, Scottish kin, but I dinna ken how you can stomach sheep’s stomach.)
Did my mother like these things? I’d argue that she hates them as much as I do but forced them down my gullet like her mother did before her. Fellow parents, why do we do this? Why are we serving foods like creamed beans, stewed turnips, scrambled eggplant, jellied anything, roasted organ “meats” that looked like they cooked before the age of colour television? We hated it when we were kids and yet we’re punishing the next generation by forcing it on them, and doing so because we were raised thinking that it if it makes you die inside a little with every bite, it’s good for you.
Don’t mistake me—I’m not a junk food junkie. I love vegetables—I just believe that you don’t have to cook all the fun out of them. I toss a mean salad. I stir a fierce fry. I am the roastess with the mostess. I yam what I eat. I have thyme to spare. I go nuts for almonds. Salmon-chanted evening, I’ll invite you all over for the most delicious seafood chowder you’ve ever had, just for the halibut. But with cod as my witness, I’ll go hungry again before I ever eat another cooked carrot.
And please feel free to send all the starving children in other countries my share, Ma. I’ll pay the postage.
And now a song – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM

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