The British Carrot Growers Association will host National Carrot Day on 3 October in Yorkshire and online to bring awareness and “safeguard the future” of this incredibly heathy and versatile root vegetable.
“It’s time to make a bit of noise about the nation’s favourite vegetable, the carrot,” says Rodger Hobson, Chair of the BCGA and a carrot farmer based in York. “If every household nibbles their way through just a few more carrots each year it would be a huge help to farmers and help keep home-grown carrots on the shelves.”
That message is particularly important as growers across the produce industry – not just carrots, but other fruit and veg – face uphill battles against costs of operation and maintaining their farms. On the flip side, increasing a shop of fresh carrots could help families struggling to eat their five per day consume more veg.
“This multipurpose vegetable is iconic,” Hobson said. “Carrots are such good value for money and extremely versatile with high nutritional value. I challenge the British public to find anything better value than 6p – the price of a carrot – to consume one of their five a day.”
Fun day on the way
More than 700,000 tonnes of carrots are grown in the UK every year … and consumers not only find them appealing raw but also love repurposing them in a variety of dishes. There will assuredly never be shortages, as long as there is support for farmers, as more than 20 billion seeds are planted annually. The BCGA says each person could eat 100 carrots per year if they wanted to.
Those statistics and the embrace of fun facts like these below in a recent press release are sure to make National Carrot Day a fun event:
- If you laid all the carrots grown every year in the UK end to end, they would stretch 1.4 million miles – that’s two and a half trips to the moon.
- The 700,000 tonnes grown every year are equivalent to 70 times the weight of the Eiffel tower.
- The ancient Greeks called the carrot “Philtron” which is derived from the work philein “to love”. They used it as a love medicine to make men more ardent and women more yielding.
- According to the Asian tradition of classifying foods as yin, yang or neutral, carrots are regarded as yang food, known for their tendency to warm the body, tighten muscles and speed up movement.
National Carrot Day is being led Britain’s top carrot growers (Huntapac Produce ltd, Kettle Produce ltd, M.H Poskitts ltd, Burgess Farms, and Strawson ltd) during peak harvest time and when the BCGA holds its annual demonstration day. BCGA says people will be encouraged to buy, get creative, cook with, and eat carrots.
“We want to communicate both the challenges and joys of growing carrots, which has a high disease susceptibility, high input costs and a conflictingly low price on the supermarket shelf, which means making a viable return a struggling reality for UK carrot growers,” Hobson said. “Boosting consumption by even small volumes, across many homes, will support the farmers and keep domestically grown carrots firmly planted in the UK.”
Organisers are asking British consumers and the industry to post their carrot pics, dishes and stories about the iconic vegetable on social media and add the hashtag: #lovebritishcarrots to your posts. They can do this on Instagram using the tag @lovebritishcarrots. They can also check out the website http://britishcarrots.co.uk/ for all things carrots.
