THERE is a fateful moment in the life of every carrot in search of a place on a supermarket shelf. It comes soon after harvest, on a 30mph conveyor belt in the din of an automated £750,000 packing plant.

Pre-sorted for size, the carrot is launched into the air under the eye of a computer-controlled video camera, which films each carrot. In less than a millisecond, the computer compares it with a picture of the perfect carrot stored on its hard drive. Each carrot that fails to match up in terms of shape, bend, splits or blemishes is identified while still airborne and nudged off course by a tiny jet of air, landing in a “bulk holding area”, rejected by man, machine and a culture of vegetable conformity.

This week the Prince of Wales went public in praise of “wibbly-wobbly” carrots, by which he seemed to mean odd-sized, misshapen ones.

Showing off a large tray of them on his farm in Gloucestershire, he lamented the fact that all would fail to meet supermarkets’ cosmetic standards and urged the carrot-buying public to embrace carrot diversity.

His remarks have struck a chord. The Soil Association, of which he is patron, said it was “delighted”. Anthony Worrall Thompson, the celebrity chef and longstanding champion of vegetables with character, will welcome his new ally.

Earlier this month the National Trust announced a national hunt for Britain’s ugliest vegetable, and yesterday the British Nutrition Foundation confirmed that knobbly carrots are every bit as nutritious as “normal” ones.

But how to get your hands on them if you lack your own organic farm? Not easily. Behind our mania for catwalk-ready produce lies a bleak tale of discrimination and waste. The secret life of the knobbly carrot is harsh.

It starts with the grower’s choice of seed — 75 per cent of the carrots grown in Britain are of the Nairobi variety, chosen largely for length, straightness, ease of washing and “because it travels and stores well”, according to the Soil Association.

Much of the remaining 25 per cent are Imperators, which come out of the ground large but are mechanically cut and peeled to produce what look like baby carrots for snacks and lunchboxes.

Andrew Burgess, a grower in East Anglia grower, admitted that “if flavour was the number one criterion we could select different varieties”, but he insisted that consumers were ultimately the ones who chose by look.

Short, cartoonish Chantenays do reach supermarkets, along with delicate Yukons and Napolis (usually in bunches, still attached to their stalks). But all are hard to grow and too fragile for the £250,000 harvesters that dig up most of Britain’s carrots at up to 60 tons per hour. They are picked by hand and priced accordingly.

Six per cent of carrots never get fatter than a pencil or closer to the market than the grower’s “preliminary grading table”, a belt of steel rollers. They fall through the gaps and are ploughed back into the ground.

A further five per cent — 50,000 tonnes a year — are rejected at the same stage as being too fat at over 45mm (the thickness of a decent leek). These are destined to be shredded for salads and soups, cut into batons for dipping, mulched for animal feed or left in their oversize splendour to be eaten whole by horses. Some knobbly carrots may survive the preliminary grading but their remaining time intact is short.

Supermarkets have aesthetic standards for organic as well as “ conventional” carrots, so both types undergo the same screening at the packing plant. First, they are washed by being floated out of trucks and into revolving barrels equipped with soft internal brushes. “It’s all about being gentle,” says Mr Burgess, who operates two packing plants. “They’re not as sturdy as you think, carrots.”

They are then cooled in water from the average of 20C at which they emerge from the soil to the 3C at which, if lucky, they will be sold.

Then comes the ordeal of optical grading. The ideal carrot against which computers judge those flying past it is based on EU marketing standards, which divide those worthy of sale to humans into two classes. Only class one carrots reach supermarkets whole, and no knobbly carrots make that grade.

The customer’s best hope of finding a truly knobbly carrot lies in the booming organic box business. Sales of boxes of vegetables delivered weekly to homes soared by 20 per cent last year. But by far the most likely fate of a truly knobbly carrot remains the processing plant — or the skip.

Prêt à Manger welcomes knobbly carrots and buys 17 tons of them a year for its carrot cake alone.

The Knobbly Carrot Company, based in Lampeter, Wales, is even more enthusiastic. “The knobblier the better,” a spokesman said. But does it sell them? No. It is a soup and salad company.

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