This morning, Oregonian food writer Molly Harbarger dropped an orange howitzer shell on your frontal lobe with an amazing expose that rips the lid off conventional wisdom surrounding carrots and their strange, inscrutable life cycle, in an article entitled Everything You Thought You Knew About Baby Carrots Is Wrong.

An excerpt:

Baby carrots are not the babies of carrots. Farmers don't plant baby carrot seeds, nor do they pull up carrots before they become full grown.

They are just chopped up regular carrots.

The article continued for another three mind-melting paragraphs and provided a link back to an even more in-depth investigation by the Washington Post into the long, sordid history of baby carrots, which I defy anyone in their right mind to read. More importantly, it led everyone here at the Mercury offices to ask one burning orange question:

Who the fuck DIDN'T know that baby carrots were just cut up carrots?

Is this what the Oregonian thinks of their readers? That we actually thought we were buying bags of little murdered carrots (AKA vegetable veal)? That baby carrots are created by mischievous Carrot Elves with paring knife-fingernails, setting upon bad baby carrots while they sleep? Or perhaps from small teams of highly trained gophers carefully nibbling down each carrot in a process known as "carrotcisions?"

We reached out to a baby carrot for response, but have yet to receive comment. Will update as necessary.