The Observer's Blog

"Carrots are sweet . . ."

I don't usually write anything about what happens in the workplace for fear of being found out and possibly exposed for all of the things I could be linked to via the Bigwhoop. However, I can't help myself this time because the story is just too bizarre. There was a conversation over coffee today that began innocently enough, discussing the home-baked goods proffered for general consumption.

A faculty member, whom we'll call Abe, picked up a piece, bit into and asked, "What is this?"

I had tried a piece of the bread-like stuff a minute earlier, and I wasn't sure what it was myself. A fellow grad student, we'll call her Sarah, chimed in, "I don't know, but it sure is dense."

"Yeah, it's almost like bread pudding," Abe agreed.

I thought bread pudding was more pudding than bread, and shouldn't be something you could eat with your fingers. But I didn't argue with Abe because he's English, and I figured that the English probably invented bread pudding and so he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, this reminded me of an obsession of Abe's concerning American cake, which he claims is too foamy. "This is pretty dense. Is this like the density of European cake?"

I struck a nerve, as only I can, and Prof. Abe started going on about how you can't get a decent cake in America, because it's too foamy. Though, he noted the stuff we were eating was in fact more dense than English cake.

"Well," I interjected, "some cakes here are fairly dense. For example, carrot cake isn't usually very foamy."

"Carrot cake!" Dr. Abe exclaimed, "That's just wrong! You can't mix vegetables and cake together."

Though he was surely being facetious, this is the moment my fellow grad student Sarah chose to defend the honor of carrot cake in a most bizarre fashion. "Actually, carrots are naturally sweet," she explained.

There was a moment of stunned silence as Dr. Abe and I mentally replayed what Sarah had just said, making sure we really heard what we thought. I left the argument to Abe, who after all believed that carrots had no business in cake in the first place. "Carrots? They aren't sweet, they're a vegetable." This was the best he could do. Haven't we all eaten carrots, doesn't everyone realize they are not the sort of thing one usually describes as sweet?

"But they have sugars in them," Sarah replied. Only in my own behavior have I ever seen such a desire to earnestly defend such a ridiculous position, and I must say I admire Sarah on some level for that. However, the man who discovered the Kuiper Belt would have none of this "carrots are sweet" nonsense and continued to try to convince her how wrong she was. In the end he only succeeded in arguing her into silence, and Abe's position was vindicated as he presented Sarah's position (protecting her identity) to his 10:30 a.m. Solar system class. The class laughed multiple times, but not because they understood what Abe was talking about. A man arguing strongly a point about carrots is just intrinsically funny.

Posted by tdupuy at March 29, 2005 10:17 PM