Tiny vegetables a growing trend, says Andrew Coppolino

We tend to love and protect small things like babies. And puppies and kittens. They are the cute versions of their adult selves — and only fleetingly so.

While in the scientific and medical world, the terms pedomorphism and neoteny describe the retention of juvenile features in the adult species, in pop culture the messaging service Snapchat allows users to alter photos of themselves with lenses to create cute, baby-eyed images with a kitty-cat nose or ears.

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Japanese culture has given us "Hello Kitty" and "kawaii," a rebellious cute culture that grew out of protests against authority in the 1960s (when else?) and embraces, in part, the cute and the diminutive.  

To that specialized interest in the elfin, we can now add food. The "mouse melon," for instance, is a puny nugget that looks like a mini watermelon and tastes like cucumber and lime. And joining the itty-bitty cucamelon, is a recent proliferation of other so-called baby vegetables, those smaller versions of the full-grown vegetables.

They too have an, "Awwww, cute!" factor.

Cult of cute

In the supersize combo culture of recent decades — 64-oz. soda pop beverages and mega-stacks of poutine amply loaded with a half-dozen toppings — small, tiny foods are a counterpoint. A quick check of the supermarket aisles is proof of the trend: mini-Oreos, mini-donuts (Dunkin Donuts once used diminutive actor Hervé Villechaize to promote these), Ritz Bits peanut butter crackers and mini granola and chocolate bars.

It's the same in the produce section. We've come to love toy vegetables that foreshadow their full size but will never get there. Take carrots, for instance. A full-sized carrot is, well, a carrot that we imagine the super-cute Bugs Bunny eating. But a baby carrot — now that is a cute carrot. 

In fact, most baby carrots are not babies at all. It was a crafty farmer who, in the 1980s, tried to calculate how he could get gnarly, misshapen and therefore unwanted carrots to market to avoid losing money. He came up with a method of cutting and paring the carrots and shaving them down to a uniform size.

It was a spot of genius that boosted carrot sales in that era — and all by appealing to that very elemental aspect of human nature that just adores things that are adorably Lilliputian.

There are many other examples of so-called baby vegetables. It started with the simplicity of the nouvelle cuisine of the 1960s, but in the last few years, chefs have been ardently garnishing plates with microgreens such as tiny young corn shoots, baby arugula, teensy-weensy pea shoots, miniscule mustard and baby beet greens: the cute little veg selections took off in popularity.

You can both buy them, hydroponically and organically grown, or you can sprout them quickly on your balcony at home and just snip them with scissors and serve.

Tiny practicality

The list of baby vegetables — some just picked immature and others bred specifically to be small –— is long, including baby corn, which has been around for decades though, it would seem, is universally reviled.

Tomatoes are no longer just Beefsteaks or Romas: they come in a couple of Tiny Tim (and cuter) dimensions including grape-sized and multi-coloured. It's slick marketing, that's for sure: It makes them easier to snack on.

Red, yellow and orange peppers have been miniaturized and because they have fewer seeds and membranes inside, they are easier to clean and eat. Again, the condensed version is simply appealing and charmingly cute. Bok choy, it seems to me, is small enough, but there is on the market baby bok choy which is, naturally, cuter than its full-sized parents.

Baby gem lettuce — or sucrine or sugar lettuce (the name itself is a hint) — is a gem because it looks like a wee version of the clunkier, awkward Romaine lettuce. The puckered and corrugated small leaves of the lettuce stay incredibly crisp and are good for making veggie wraps like Korean ssam.

Baby artichokes combine delightful cutesy as a diminution of their larger (and titanic sounding) brethren globe artichokes with a practicality that makes the prep cook's job an easier one. The little artichokes have no central and fibrous "choke" that needs to be cleaned out and fewer tough and spiny leaves (called bracts) that need to be cut off prior to cooking.

Our love of food runs very deep, but with baby-sized versions, it's the surface that we find most attractive.