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Carrots Can’t Help You See in the Dark. Here’s How a World War II Propaganda Campaign…

Doctor Carrot

Posters, newspaper advertisements and radio shows promoted carrots' health benefits. Imperial War Museums via Getty Images

Research suggests that eating carrots can boost eye health—but these gains come with caveats. As John Stolarczyk, curator of the virtual World Carrot Museum, told Smithsonian magazine in 2013, the science has been stretched into a pervasive myth: that carrots boast a vegetable superpower, improving nighttime vision. In truth, carrots can’t help the average person see better in the dark any more than eating blueberries will turn them blue.

Carrots contain a pigment called beta carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A. Not having enough of this vitamin can cause night blindness, a condition where it’s difficult to see in low light, or even cause blindness in general. Young children and pregnant women living in low-income countries where nutrient-rich food isn’t readily available are most at risk of vitamin A deficiency. But while studies show that “taking vitamin A can reverse poor vision caused by a deficiency, it will not strengthen eyesight or slow decline in people who are healthy,” the New York Times reported in 2005.

“Somewhere on the journey, the message that carrots are good for your eyes became disfigured into improving eyesight,” Stolarczyk said. His digital museum, full of surprising and obscure facts about carrots, investigates how the idea became so dominant, tracing its roots to propaganda shared by the British government during World War II.

Carrots and World War II propaganda

According to Stolarczyk, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information popularized the carrot myth as part of a subterfuge operation to hide a technology critical to the Allies’ victory**.** He came to this conclusion after studying files from the Imperial War Museum, the Mass Observation Archive and the U.K. National Archives.

A Royal Air Force plane equipped with aircraft interception radar

A Royal Air Force plane equipped with aircraft interception radar Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

During the Blitz, an aerial bombing campaign waged against Britain by the Nazis between September 1940 and May 1941, the German Luftwaffe often struck under the cover of darkness. To make it more difficult for enemy planes to hit their targets, the British government issued citywide blackouts. The Royal Air Force (RAF) also repelled the German fighters with the aid of a new, secret radar technology.

First used by the RAF in 1940, the onboard aircraft interception radar (also known as A.I. radar) could pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. To keep that information under wraps, however, the ministry provided another reason for the RAF’s success: carrots.

In 1940, RAF fighter ace John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat’s Eyes,” became the first British pilot to shoot down an enemy plane with A.I. radar. He’d later rack up an impressive total of 20 kills, 19 of which were at night. The government told newspapers that the reason for the RAF’s success was the fact that pilots like Cunningham ate an excess of carrots.

The ruse, perhaps meant to send German tacticians on a wild goose chase, may not have fooled the Nazis as planned.

“I have no evidence they fell for it, other than that the use of carrots to help with eye health was well ingrained in the German psyche,” Stolarczyk added. “It was believed that they had to fall for some of it. There are apocryphal tales that the Germans started feeding their own pilots carrots, as they thought there was some truth in it.”

A portrait of John Cunningham, the Royal Air Force pilot nicknamed "Cat's Eyes"

Bryan Legate, an assistant curator at the Royal Air Force Museum in London, offered a different perspective on the matter. Though the British were “happy to go along with the story [of carrot-improved vision], they never set out to use it to fool the Germans,” Legate told Scientific American in 2014. “The German intelligence service were well aware of our ground-based radar installation and would not be surprised by the existence of radar in aircraft. In fact, the RAF were able to confirm the existence of German airborne radar simply by fitting commercial radios into a bomber and flying over France listening to the various radio frequencies.”

Carrots on the British home front

Regardless of whether the Germans bought the story, the British public seemed poised to take the bait. Posters distributed by the government advertised carrots’ ability to “keep you healthy and help you to see” during blackouts. As a London correspondent wrote for the New York Times in 1942, Lord Woolton, the U.K.’s minister of food, tried to “wean the British away from cabbage and brussels sprouts [by] plugging carrots. To hear him talk, they contain enough vitamin A to make moles see in a coal mine.”

A World War II propaganda poster about carrots

As shortages and rationing measures made foods like sugar, bacon and butter increasingly hard to get, the national Dig for Victory campaign encouraged families to grow their own vegetables in so-called victory gardens. Marketing materials featured cartoon mascots named Doctor Carrot and Potato Pete. According to Stolarczyk, the Ministry of Food encouraged so much extra production that by 1942, the nation boasted a 100,000-ton surplus of carrots.

Doctor Carrot, a bespectacled vegetable toting a top hat and a briefcase containing vitamin A, was especially popular, appearing in newspaper advertisements and posters. Hank Porter, a leading cartoonist at the Walt Disney Studios, created a whole fictional family inspired by Doctor Carrot. Though Disney produced posters, recipe booklets and flyers featuring Carroty George, Pop Carrot and Clara Carrot, the British government didn’t distribute these widely, as officials felt Doctor Carrot had already been established as a recognizable character.

In communications to the public, Woolton emphasized the need for self-sustainability on the British home front, saying, “This is a food war. Every extra row of vegetables in allotments saves shipping. … The battle on the kitchen front cannot be won without help from the kitchen garden.” A propaganda film released by the Ministry of Information in 1941, meanwhile, closed with the question “Isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?”

The carrot characters created by Disney cartoonist Hank Porter

British citizens regularly tuned in to radio broadcasts like “The Kitchen Front,” a daily, five-minute BBC program that doled out cooking tips and new recipes. Beyond victory gardens, government officials called for home cooks to use surplus foods as substitutes for scarce ingredients. Recipes for carrot pudding, carrot cake, carrot marmalade and carrot flan relied on the root vegetable as a sweetener in the absence of sugar, which was rationed at eight ounces per adult each week. Concoctions like carrolade, a juice made from rutabagas and carrots, also offered an easy sweet fix.

Stolarczyk has tried many of the dishes advertised by “The Kitchen Front” and other wartime sources, including Woolton Pie (named after the food minister), carrot flan and carrot fudge. In his view, carrolade was one of the government’s stranger ideas. “The Ministry of Food had what I call a ‘silly ideas’ section where they threw out crazy ideas to see what would stick—this was one of those,” Stolarczyk said. “At the end of the day, the people were not stupid. If it tasted horrible, they tended to shy away.”

Contrary to World War II propaganda, eating carrots doesn’t lend humans catlike night vision, though it does offer other benefits, from supporting immunity to maintaining eye health. At the same time, however, carrots are high in sugar compared with vegetables like spinach. As optometric physician and nutrition specialist Steven Newman said in a 2017 statement from the American Optometric Association, “Whenever patients ask about carrots, I say, ‘Switch the channel. Popeye is definitely more knowledgeable than Bugs Bunny on this one.’”

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