Thread by @ajcdeane

#Deanehistory 152. Hat tip: @BlueEarthMngmnt.

Why are carrots orange?

This will likely seem a strange question to you, since – from Bugs Bunny snacking on them in your childhood cartoons, to what hits your plate when you’ve been naughty – you are so accustomed to them being orange that you don’t really think of them another way.

But for millennia, pretty much all carrots everywhere were not orange. Instead, they were yellow, white or purple. It was in the 1600s that the orange dominance rapidly occurred, and – as so often – it’s all down to the Dutch.

William of Orange – and I concede that you may have worked this out already, but I’ll spell it out – was a big deal, having been the figurehead of the successful Dutch independence movement. Sycophantic Dutch carrot growers naturally saw their big chance and sprung into action.

Created in homage to William, the orange carrots cultivated in that time might merely have been a fad, but– alas for purple, white, yellow, various other leading coloured carrots– the hitherto diverse history of the carrot was destroyed by orange monoculture in a matter of years.

Presumably, and here we are in speculation but with such a vital subject it’s warranted I think, it was crosses between Eastern carrots (which are or were purple) & Western carrots (which are or were white or red) that

gave rise to the orange interloper-cum-dominant force in all carrotdom.

Yes, yes – it is true that if you eat in a fancy restaurant you may occasionally be served an ultra-thin example of a different colours. But be honest – you know what’s what in terms of carrot league table.

The truth of it is that whilst (and carrot scholars hotly debate this, no doubt daily) it is unlikely that humanity had even known a single orange carrots before the Dutch got to work, they are now the pre-eminent carrot.

Pretty much all carrots now consumed in the western world descend from that burst of the Dutch sucking up.