Confessions of a carrot packer

It recently came to my attention through Lady L and Miss S that I was part of a conspiracy to deprive northern England of comedy shaped vegetables. You know how it is, it brightens up your day when you take a carrot out of a bag and it looks like genitalia, or you come across a potato that looks like the pope. I used to have a summer job in a carrot factory. Depending on which line you worked on, there was a scale of carrot that had to be strictly adhered to. Marks & Spencer only had the best perfectly straight and unblemished carrots, and they had to be the same size give or take a few millimetres. The bigger supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsburys, were next down the chain; they allowed slightly bent carrots, and perhaps a bit of marking. Then right down at the bottom was Kwik Save. Anything went there, basically everything that the other supermarkets wouldn’t take. So my job was to weed out funnily shaped carrots, thereby depriving people of an unexpected giggle (well if you’re one of my friends anyway!), and in Miss S’s case pretty much a promotion! Surely one carrot tastes the same as another? But you wouldn’t believe the lengths the quality control people went to to ensure blemish free carrots. When the trend started for leaving the green bits on at the top for the posh folk, my that caused some people nightmares.

People of northern England, I apologise. If you want penis shaped vegetables, go to Kwik Save. It’ll be cheaper too. And taste just as lovely.

And as for the people who shop at Kwik Save. Why has their uncanny knack of getting a parsnip that looks like a willy or a potato with legs never come up in conversation?