[Sca-cooks] Looking for references to orange carrots

[Honour Horne-Jaruk]

Respected friend:

--- On Mon, 3/1/10, Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 28, 2010, at 8:33 PM, Honour Horne-Jaruk wrote:
> >     Unfortunately, the original died in my friend's house fire.
> > IIRC, it was a summer issue in the mid-seventies. Most larger 
> >libraries have National Geographic collections on
> >disk nowadays; a search of that era's disk might prove
> >fruitful.

> But is an article from 30 years ago
> in this case still valid, given
> all the new research?
 
> Johnnae

     I wouldn't have thought much of it even then, if it didn't happen to match carrot variety extinction patterns so closely. It was in the late 1700s that thousands of carrot types suddenly disappear from seed stocks and planting records-- always replaced by carrots listed as either "new" or "sweet."
    Corollary evidence is provided by the exact same extinction pattern following the supersweet  green pea mutation. (The greatest medieval pea, the Grey Field, had the same protein level as steak. It is now almost certainly extinct, shouldered out by the modern green sweet pea)
     Come to think of it, a century earlier New World beans did the exact same thing to Europe's huge range of broad beans, leaving only the Fava out of thousands of local cultivars. However, I feel morally obliged to point out that if the others tasted like Favas, the change was comprehensible, even if not good in botanical terms.

Yours in service to both the Societies of which I am a member-
(Friend) Honour Horne-Jaruk, R.S.F.
Alizaundre de Brebeuf, C.O.L. S.C.A.- AKA Una the wisewoman, or That Pict

If you're doing your best, and your best isn't very good, that's life. If you aren't doing your best, _that's cheating_.