Once upon a time, an alien ship crash landed on a tiny island in the Mediterranean sea. For all you know, it might have been Corsica or Ibiza. The two aliens on that ship that survived, incidentally one male and one female, were the only ones on the entire island. They roamed around and explored the island until they were very hungry.

Having looked all around the island, they hadn't found anything that appeared familiar to them when compared to the foods that they had access to back on their planet. When they sat down to think what they could eat for food, they happened to be among a bunch of carrot plants. They noticed little orange things in the ground that had green stems and leaves growing out of it. Wondering why the base was orange, they pulled one out. And they had a carrot in their hands. Immediately, it began to rain. So they ran out of there to find some shelter. Once they did, they looked at the orange thing in their hands. The rain had washed all the mud off of it. And like humans, they were drawn to the colour orange as well.

Given how hungry they were, they decided to bite into the orange thing. When they did, it turned out to be tasty and they were no longer hungry. So they learnt to eat carrots whenever they were hungry.

Then they procreated and proliferated the tiny Mediterranean island with more aliens of their kind. They reached a point when the carrots that naturally grew could no longer feed them. The carrots that naturally grew were just a small percentage of all the edible things that grew on the island. They could very well have eaten apples, or potatoes, or corn, or oranges, or bananas, or tomatoes, or cucumbers, well you get the point. They could have eaten pretty much anything else. But the original two aliens that survived had been dead by now and all their descendants had grown up believing that carrots were the only edible things.

So they put their wits together and learnt farming. The lands where all the other tasty things that grew naturally were slowly taken over to grow more and more carrots. And the aliens reproduced some more. Now, all the carrots from the farms weren't enough to feed the entire population of the island.

The smarter ones began to learn how to grow more carrots per acre of land and in a few years, could grow hundred times more carrots on the same area of land as compared to others. So they started selling the carrots they grew to the others and got them to do their bidding for them.

A few generations later, all those who were buying carrots from the super productive farmers forgot how to grow their own carrots and depended on the owners of the farms to create jobs for them so that they could provide something in return for the carrots that they needed.

A rogue alien or two, here and there, began to rebel and began to live on potatoes, and corn and the more adventurous ones even began to catch and eat fish.

But many were still not brave enough to eat these unsafe foods. What if they fell sick? What if they didn't live as long as the others that ate carrots? What if they couldn't run as fast as the others? No, it was the safe thing to do to eat carrots and nothing else. It didn't matter if it killed them to earn those carrots (well, not literally killed them, of course!), they would do it nonetheless. Because it was scary to not do what everybody wasn't doing and go eat potatoes or fish.

And thus grew their love for carrots.

We are a little like these aliens, aren't we? Only our carrots are getting a college degree, getting a job, a wife, a kid, a house a car, climbing up the corporate ladder.

As Douglas Adams said, so long and thanks for all the fish. I mean, carrots.