Michael Coates got a rare surprise when he returned home from his weekly shop recently. While he had gone out to buy some vegetables and other supplies for the week, upon taking out his shopping he said he couldn’t hold the laughter back. While there was no issue with his shopping, the carrots gave him a great surprise. The pictures tell the full story.
It appears that Coates, aged 47, is not too old to see the funny side of life. He purchased a bag of carrots recently as well as a number of other items. When he got home and started to unpack the carrots, one gave him a big surprise. The carrot was not the usual shape you would expect and actually looked like two legs with male genitalia in between! While Coates had been planning to stew the carrots he decided against devouring this strange vegetable as he said it wasn’t his particular taste.
The image has since gone viral because of its lude appearance with people online also reveling in the image lookalike. Coates has decided to keep the carrot as a souvenir but says he knows it won’t last long. In a few days, he will have to throw out the special vegetable.
While the carrot already has a particularly phallic shape the strange variety that Coates found really won the prize for most lude vegetables. It is not the first adult looking vegetable that has gone viral though. The parsnip has also delighted online food followers in the past. When the Cornish Food Box Company launched a campaign for humorous food pictures it was inundated with vegetables of every variety.
However, we think it will be hard to be the appearance of this carrot. The straight leg with one bent is so artistic that Michaelangelo would probably name this carrot David. While Michael didn’t end up eating the carrot he said it was worth 0.49 pence a kilo he paid for the carrot just to give him and the online community a brief smile.
The funny picture does raise a more important point about how standardized vegetables have become. The stranger the shape and the color the less these fruits and vegetables have been genetically interfered with to look uniform for the shop floor. If you ever have the opportunity you should purchase the weird-looking vegetables whether they look like a naked person, a sexual position or nothing at all.
The idea of genetically modified food has caused some strong reactions in recent times, and rightly so. More and more of our foods are being genetically modified today to resist certain pesticides, to grow larger, to be a little juicer, to have a brighter color and to basically be more appealing to the average shopper. Yet there are serious questions over what this means for our long term health. Still, people have been altering vegetables for hundreds of years.
Long before GMO foods became an issue, people were selective breeding fruits and vegetables (and animals too). If you look at the evolution of fruits over time it is clear they have changed dramatically. The carrot, for example, was originally thought to be purple or white and a forked root (a root that splits into two parts). The carrot that Mr. Coates found is clearly a throwback to older days as it is a forked root as well, although still the bright orange color.
Selective breeding and the modern use of GMO have changed fruits and vegetables forever. Today most fruits and vegetables are so uniform in appearance that it is extremely rare to find one out of shape. The one Coates found though, was not just out of shape, it was a little bit hilarious.