The Ferrari 458 Italia is a wonderful car, says James May, but a lack of circles means that driving it can be a bit mundane.

The problem with carrots is that this most humble and dependable of vegetables has become a tragic victim of fashion, pretension and pseudo-intellectualism. I refer especially to the way carrots are cut. There seems to be a belief among too many people that they should be sliced lengthways, into something called “batons”, because cutting them in the other direction is somehow a bit plebeian. Worse, there are some who cut them on the slant, to produce ellipses. In May’s Britain this sort of thing would be punished by a week of pea-peeling.

This is where polite society finds itself these days – not in May’s Britain, sadly, but tyrannised by a sort of carrot-cutting shibboleth and in fear of excommunication as a result of an innocent slip-up with a Kitchen Devil.

But now take yourself to that quiet and largely ignored place where genuine self-knowledge dwells; where you know, in your heart, that salad cream is much better than mayonnaise. Now ask yourself this: if you were the last survivor of the nuclear holocaust, and you were alone with a carrot, then how, after you’d pushed the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes to one side and enjoyed a bowl of Frosties, would you cut it up? You’d cut it crossways, into circles. You know you would.

I would, and I do, and here’s why. I’m actually neurotic enough to have done some carrot-steaming experimentation and they cook better as circles. The structure of a carrot is not uniform throughout and it is only by cutting one absolutely at right angles to its longitudinal axis that a perfect cross-section of all carroty qualities presents itself.

Read the rest right here.