Ciaran Ryan, Tumblr

Why would you sharpen a carrot, I hear you asking? At $3.77, why wouldn’t you?

It’s not just carrots, either: you can sharpen zucchini and cukes too – and if you want a tactical version, it comes in black for $10.

More prosaically, it does effectively shred carrots while providing some visual whimsy, possibly sufficient to lure the kids in your home into helping with dinner prep.

https://twitter.com/JG_Ballard/status/396634596025987072

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell, in J. G. Ballard: Conversations (ed. V. Vale, RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Having lived through the post-war austerity years in England, there was a deep masochistic strain in the English population of the late Forties and Fifties which was only thrown off in the Sixties. I mean, for twenty years the British wanted to be rationed. We needed to be rationed; we needed to be short of clothes, fresh food, possibility … we needed to feel guilty because we’d lost the war, we’d lost the empire, and ceded the running of the world to the Americans. We felt we needed to be punished for all that. And we embraced austerity. Populations have these deep-rooted needs.