I see

All right, we all heard this from our mothers back in the day: "Eat your carrots! They're good for your eyes!"

Well, yes and no, like almost everything your mother said. Yes, carrots are good for you in that they are full of Vitamin A, which is good to keep your corneas (the outside covering of eyes) clear. Vitamin A is also high in rhodopsin, which is good for helping us see in dim light. It is not a component of "retsyn," that combination of copper gluconate and hydrogenated cottonseed oil that was the main ingredient in those Certs breath mints sold to halitosis patients the world over.

But you could gobble carrots faster than Bugs Bunny without appreciable improvement in your ability to read an eye chart twenty feet away. Don't get mad at Mom for foisting off that story on you, though. She was just repeating what governments were saying while waging World War II.

Before the United States was attacked and forced to enter the war (it's in all the textbooks!) Great Britain was fighting Hitler's Germany alone, and had to rely on food coming from their colonies, and their former colony - us - to feed their citizens and their armed forces. People were also encouraged to plant vegetables to grow their own food in their yards, their soccer fields, their castles...anywhere there were two square feet of earth, someone was liable to plant something to eat.

Such as carrots, which are simple enough to grow, and they don't taste all that bad, so lots of British people had carrots in various forms with dinner. And as the Blitzkrieg raged, England came up with a secret weapon to fight back.

It was called AIR - Airborne Intercept Radar. It was a simple matter of putting radar, which helped to guide pilots to their destination, in the airplanes themselves, thus giving bombers a great advantage in fending off aerial invasions. The big hero was Royal Air Force Squadron Leader John "Cat's Eyes" Cunningham, who shot down a total of 20 German planes, 19 of them at night.

And the British government made a huge deal of Cunningham's prowess, claiming that he had the same night vision as cats do, and attributing that to all the carrots he was consuming.  And that was the point, to let the Germans think the carrots were the trick and nor the AIR.

It was a little while before Hitler's people came up with their own version of Airborne Intercept Radar, and by then, England was getting some help fighting the Axis powers, but the carrot industry did not complain about the boost they got from the legend meant to distract Berlin.

And your mom just wanted you to have something good in your tummy, alongside all those potato chips and Popsicles.