What Is This Enormous Vegetable and Why Is It in Our Refrigerator? (Update!)

Join me on a quick break from our regular scheduled programming to investigate a small mystery that's sprouted in the VICE office. Six days ago a large root vegetable appeared in our fridge and no one at Motherboard knows why. I'm not entirely sure what it actually is, do you? For reference, it's about the size of the stomach of an overweight Dachshund.

Motherboard's Kaleigh Rogers says it's a turnip, which would actually make it a taproot, not a tuber as I initially assumed, but that doesn't do much to explain its prodigious size or or current existence in our fridge. (Frankly, I don't really get plants, which is why I studied zoology.) Motherboard researcher Erik Franco said that he saw Munchies editor-in-chief Helen Hollyman "carrying it around once upon a time."

Reached for comment, Hollyman explained that the Munchies team had harvested the turnip from VICE's rooftop garden. They had stored the bulbous veggie in the fridge in anticipation of making a creamy turnip soup with radish and bacon, but were derailed because "we all got too busy," Hollyman said.

I figured that it'd disappear over the weekend but it remains there, a testament to the hubris of modern humans, who are gifted with such a lavish array of technologies that we can afford the space and electricity to keep an inert mystery blob chilled for just about as long as we damn well please.

Update 7/28: This post has been updated to include comments from Hollyman.

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