The carrot you buy at the supermarket is orange. Every carrot you have ever seen at a supermarket is orange. Every child who has ever drawn a carrot has drawn it orange. The association is so complete, so total, that it seems like a fact of nature rather than a fact of history.
It is not a fact of nature. It is a fact of the Netherlands. And the story of how it happened is stranger than you think.
The first cultivated carrots, grown in what is now Afghanistan and Persia approximately 1,100 years ago, were purple and yellow. Not orange. Wild carrots were white. The orange carrot that the entire world now considers the default did not exist in any meaningful commercial form until the 17th century. A thousand years of carrot history, and almost none of it orange.
The popular version of this story is clean and satisfying: Dutch farmers in the 17th century selectively bred orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange, the founding father of the Dutch Republic, who led the struggle for independence from Spanish rule. Orange became the colour of Dutch national identity. The carrot followed. The story spread across the world along with the carrot itself, and now everyone eats orange vegetables in unconscious homage to a 16th-century Dutch revolutionary.
It is a wonderful story. It is almost certainly not true.
John Stolarczyk, curator of the World Carrot Museum (yes, this exists), has spent more time researching carrot history than any other person alive. His conclusion is direct: “There is no documentary evidence that the Dutch invented orange carrots to honour their royal family.” Orange carrots appear in European records as far back as the 15th century, more than a hundred years before William of Orange was born. The political tribute story, however appealing, collapses under basic chronology.
What the Dutch did do, and this part is historically solid, is refine, stabilise, and disseminate orange carrots more effectively than anyone else. The Long Orange Dutch carrot, first described in writing in 1721, became the direct ancestor of virtually every orange carrot grown commercially today. The Dutch were the agricultural innovators of the 17th century, and they pushed orange carrots across European markets with the same efficiency they applied to tulips, trade routes, and financial instruments.
The actual origin of orange carrots is more complex and more interesting than the political legend. Genetic research suggests that orange carrots most likely developed from yellow Western varieties through natural mutation and selective breeding, not from purple Eastern varieties as the popular story implies. The yellow-to-orange transition probably happened gradually across Western Europe, with Dutch growers doing the most significant horticultural work to lock in the colour, increase the sugar content, and create a variety that grew reliably in Northern European climates.
Why did orange win? Partly because of the Dutch agricultural machine. Partly because orange carrots are genuinely richer in beta-carotene, the pigment that gives them their colour and converts in the human body to vitamin A. A sweeter, nutritionally denser carrot that grew well in cool climates was always going to outcompete its purple and yellow cousins in European markets. The political story may be a myth, but the vegetable itself had genuine advantages.
There is a footnote to all of this that I find irresistible as a Frenchman who has spent his life in kitchens. The colour orange, because of its association with William of Orange and later with his descendant William III who overthrew the Catholic King James II of England, became politically loaded across the British Isles in ways that endure to this day. In Northern Ireland, orange is the colour of Protestant identity. The Orange Order takes its name from the same House of Orange. Every July 12th, tens of thousands of people march through Belfast carrying the symbolic weight of a Dutch carrot.
A vegetable changed colour for reasons that remain disputed by historians, and the colour it became has been used ever since to mark religious and political identity across three countries. The carrot did not intend any of this. But then, the most consequential things rarely do.
In my kitchen, I use orange carrots because they are what the markets provide. But I also use purple carrots when I can find them, because they are what the carrot used to be, because the colour is extraordinary against a white plate, and because it is always worth remembering that the things we consider inevitable are usually just the things that won.
The orange carrot won. It did not have to.
Orange is a bold, attention-grabbing color, but it doesn’t always come out on top, especially in US politics. A quick rant, over.
The kitchen never lies. History sometimes does.
Jean Louis
Sources
- Tasting Table. The Potentially Royal Roots of Orange Carrots. World Carrot Museum curator John Stolarczyk.
- Next Nature. Why Are Carrots Orange? It Is Political. 2009.
- Chowhound. The Carrots of Today Are Often Orange. But They Were Not Always This Color.
