Carrot

If You Read Nothing Else

Cook them and eat them with fat. Raw and dry, you absorb a small fraction of the carotene.

The orange carrot is recent. The old Persian and Central Asian carrots were purple and yellow.

Carrots don't give you better than normal eyesight. They prevent the deficiency that damages it.

Carrots are mostly water, sugar and fibre, and then a large amount of beta-carotene, which your body converts into vitamin A as it needs it. That conversion is the reason carrots matter, and it depends on two things most people get wrong: heat, which breaks open the cell walls, and fat, which carries the carotene across the gut wall. Iran grows them everywhere and treats them as three different foods, a raw snack, a juice, and a slow-cooked halva with saffron and cardamom.

Known to botanists as Daucus carota subsp. sativus.