Air strikes and fighter pilots: How Britain sold a lie on carrots
When you step back from it a little, the idea that carrots help you see in the dark is a truly wild thing to infiltrate the popular consciousness.
It’s like saying that parsnips help you read minds, or mushrooms help you time-travel. In fact, I’m surprised that more people don’t think that last one, given what some types of mushrooms can do to an unsuspecting consumer. At the very least, spinach giving you super strength comes from a famed cartoon character, so there’s fiction baked into its origin, but why carrots?! And why specifically see in the dark?
The answer, somewhat bafflingly, comes from World War II, specifically from England during the Blitz. Fun fact, England from late 1940 and early 1941 was not a fun place to be due to all these bombs that were being dropped on the country literally every single night for eight months. What’s more, the country’s food imports were being destroyed by U-boats day after day and night after night, so the entire country was running on what the farming industry of this tiny little island could produce.
Thus, two things happened in the outbreak of the Second World War. Firstly, a strict rationing regime was put in place that vanishingly few people were excused from. The majority of the country’s diet became based around vegetables, which were the only thing its farmers could reliably produce to meet demand. The problem was that, as we all know, people aren’t exactly thrilled about eating a majority vegetable-based diet, like most vegetarians.
So the Ministry of Defence’s propaganda department had to find a way of getting people inspired to eat vegetables. Which brings us to the other thing implemented by the English government early on in the Second World War.
How did the Blitz make Brits eat more carrots?
After the bombing raids from the Luftwaffe began in earnest, it soon became clear to the Germans that trying to bomb the country during the day wouldn’t work. We were too well defended by land-to-air defences and our Royal Air Force, so the raids began to be carried out at night when their planes couldn’t be targeted quite as easily. This is when the British government implemented a strict Blackout regime where anyone with their lights on after dark would be arrested or fined.
Thus, spiritually and literally, England found itself in a dark place. Faced with a diet of nothing but veg and long, dark nights where the only light came from fiery death, the Ministry of Defence had to boost morale and decided to do so in a way that killed two birds at once. They settled on telling people that eating carrots, a vegetable that the country had a massive surplus of, made people see better in the dark. Astonishingly enough, this is actually based on a tiny kernel of truth.
Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, which, when eaten, our bodies turn into the vitamin retinol, which helps keep our eyes healthy and functioning. They obviously don’t make your vision better or help you see in the dark, but it was based in enough truth for the Ministry of Defence to claim that English pilots were so good at dealing with Jerry fighter planes because their carrot-rich diet helped them see in the dark. The resulting propaganda campaign worked so well, it’s been baked into popular myth ever since.
It also helped that they kept the fact that they’d invented the Radar under wraps. In true Blitz spirit fashion, every little helps.