This bountiful and colorful bouquet of dried-up carrots was discovered in a crisper drawer of the refrigerator in the donor’s vacation home. An unknown number of months had passed since the organic heritage carrot bunch was first placed in the refrigerator. During this interval, a power outage caused the refrigerator to be turned off for a period of time. It is unclear whether this contributed to the drying of the specimen.

It was the fragile, spindly green tops sticking out that brought attention to the specimen. The carrots were not in a plastic bag; they were loose in the bottom of the drawer. The thick blue rubber band that originally held them tightly together still encircles the carrots but is now slack, since the carrots have withered. The rubber band reads “Organically Grown Product of USA.”

Frequent visitors to this website will recognize that it’s more common to accidentally dehydrate food by leaving it out in the open air rather than in a refrigerator. Other specimens in the museum’s collection that were found in a refrigerator include the evaporated celery and the dehydrated beet.  NEXT >

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