If I were a forager and I came across a carrot out in the wild -- spotted its ferny little leaves and coaxed it out of the ground -- I would think I'd found the perfect food. It's sweet, it's orange, and there's something insanely cool about walking around with a long, slim object in one hand. Sticks, swords, cigarettes, carrots -- all inherently cool. Fortunately, carrots are also good for us.

I didn't always like carrots. The only carrots I ate as a kid were those big honkers that suburban families bought back in the '60s, carrots in plastic bags, tied at one end with a tough piece of tape that resisted every attempt to pull it apart. They were the biggest carrots 20th-century technology had to offer, a foot long and over an inch in diameter. In those space-age days of TV dinners and frozen corn, small carrots were undesirable, unworthy, un-American. But those enormous carrots were tough going for a little kid: too much food, and too hard on the inside of a little mouth. Once in a while, my mom would hand me one -- peeled, of course -- and though it looked like a cool thing to eat, it always turned out to be as chewy as a balsa-wood glider, and not as tasty. I went off carrots at an early age. They were charlatans. They were not what they seemed.

But when I was a teenager in the '70s, my family had the great fortune to live across the road from a carrot field on the outskirts of Westfield, Massachusetts. We rarely stole carrots right out of the field, since we knew the farmer, but our house was strategically located at the crossing of two bumpy roads. At harvest time, the workers would pick the carrots and toss them into a huge truck. Then the truck would come lumbering down the road and turn the corner in front of our house, slamming into one vicious pothole after another. Since the truck was always overloaded, a shower of carrots would bounce onto the ground. The truck driver didn't seem to care about a few dozen carrots, so he just sped off. My mother and I would then spring into action, paper bags in hand, and run outside to pick up the roadkill carrots. There was a spiritual, manna-from-heaven aura about the whole business. That was when I began to think there might be something more to carrots.

In my twenties I became an avid gardener. One year, on a whim, I grew a few carrots. When they fattened up and I picked the first ones, they were the best carrots I'd ever tasted. In fact, they were just about the best food I'd ever tasted -- impossibly sweet, deliciously wet -- and I was annoyed to the point of desperation that I hadn't planted more of them. I was so impatient for the rest of the little guys to reach eating size that I probed around their shoulders every day to see if any of them were ready to pull. As with many vegetables, I became a true fan of carrots only after growing them myself.

And since then, I've discovered an amazing thing about carrots. Everyone knows they're crunchy and sweet, and they make so much noise when you eat them that you can't hear the baseball announcer on the radio. But lately I've realized that when you're eating a carrot, a really good carrot, it's impossible to be unhappy. I haven't figured out why. Perhaps the crunching resonates at a frequency that drives away unhappy thoughts. Or perhaps we're instinctively drawn back our foraging days, when finding a good, juicy root was one of life's most profound experiences.

Whatever the reason, it hasn't failed me yet. Even if the Red Sox are getting the snots beaten out of them, even if my boss has sprouted horns, even if the neighbor's kids have bought themselves a karaoke machine, I get myself a good, fresh carrot and the day is transformed. One bite, and the world is an orange crunch, my hand honored to hold a little bit of heaven.

Amy Miller can be found stalking the elusive carrot on Saturdays at the San Mateo Farmers' Market. The rest of the time, she's at amymca@earthlink.net.