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Orbit Knowledge

Carrots Were Purple for Most of History. Orange Is the New Color.

The first farmed carrots in Central Asia were purple and yellow. The orange carrot took over only in the last few centuries, and the royal story behind it has no proof.

By Orbit Post2 min read
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Carrots Were Purple for Most of History. Orange Is the New Color.

Key points

  • For most of recorded history, a carrot was not orange.
  • The carrot was domesticated in Central Asia around the year 1000, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  • Good documentation of purple carrots goes back about 1,100 years to Central Asia, carrot researcher Phil Simon of the US Department of Agriculture explained in the Gastropod podcast's history of…

For most of recorded history, a carrot was not orange. It was purple.

The carrot was domesticated in Central Asia around the year 1000, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The wild ancestor had thin, pale roots, and the plant was used medicinally before the edible root was developed. The first farmed carrots came in purple, yellow, and white. By the 13th century, cultivated carrots had reached China and northwestern Europe, and the written record across the Middle East and Europe described purple and yellow roots for centuries after that.

Purple was the normal carrot

Good documentation of purple carrots goes back about 1,100 years to Central Asia, carrot researcher Phil Simon of the US Department of Agriculture explained in the Gastropod podcast's history of the carrot. Written records of purple and yellow carrots continue through the period up until the early 1500s as the crop moved west through Turkey and North Africa into Europe.

Purple carrots get their color from anthocyanins, the same pigment family that colors blueberries and red cabbage. Yellow carrots carry different carotenoid pigments. Orange carrots are loaded with beta carotene, which is where the color and much of the vitamin A value come from. Britannica notes that white, yellow, and purple fleshed varieties are still known today alongside the orange ones.

How orange took the market

Orange roots appear in European market paintings by the mid 1500s, and Dutch growers in the 16th and 17th centuries selected and stabilized the sweet orange types that spread across Europe and then the world. The most repeated explanation is a patriotic one: Dutch farmers bred orange carrots to honor William of Orange and the Dutch royal house.

That story is probably a legend. John Stolarczyk, curator of the World Carrot Museum, has stated it directly: there is no documentary evidence that the Dutch invented orange carrots to honor their royal family. Orange carrots also show up in records early enough to strain the tribute timeline. What Dutch growers demonstrably did was breed well. They turned scattered orange mutations into a reliable, sweet, high yielding crop, and traders carried it everywhere.

The old colors are back on shelves

Modern seed catalogs sell purple, yellow, white, and red carrots again, often marketed as heirlooms. They are not novelties. They are the original crop, returning after a few centuries in which one Dutch favored color quietly rewrote what the word carrot looks like. The next time a child draws a carrot orange, that crayon choice is about 400 years old. The purple version had a run of more than a thousand.

Sources