Food trivia
I will begin with a bit of weather trivia. A local observation. Today was our first snowfall of the season. Not a lot and pretty much gone by mid afternoon. But that’s how it starts. Now on to some food based trivia. In this area a staple diet consisted of potatoes and fish period. With a few root vegetables thrown in for variety. One element found in most home gardens was the common carrot. Our parents assured us that this was a necessary element in her diet. Both parents. You need to eat your carrots to be able to see at night. An odd life skill given that we lived inside during the evening and that we did not rely upon our eyesight forgetting our daily ration of potatoes and fish. Turns out that this was an element leftover from wartime. In order to hide the reality of the new radar systems the military press circulated the myth the Commonwealth pilots we’re doing much better than their adversary because they could see better in the dark. Due in large part to a steady diet of carrots. As a child I had never thought much about it. My parents had told me this and that was all that was needed but in a place where carrots had to be grown specifically it seemed like a good idea. Whether we could see better in the dark than anyone else in the nation was unclear. We have been told. The carrot does not get much variety in the average diet. You boil them and you give them a dollop of butter and you put them on the plate and then you tell the kids to eat. Which they did. And which we did. Carrots were not something you ever left behind because of your eyes. To find out that this was not based on science but rather on an attempt to mask a military technology events seems funny a lifetime later. There should have been a better story that they could offer. And we heard locally because we had a Commonwealth flying school. A place for pilots trained before going off to war. Who better to spread the myth than those who most needed the skill.
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