Why are carrots actually orange?
Internet news: carrots are orange out of patriotism, as a tribute to the royal family and the national celebratory colour of the Netherlands. Carrots actually came in all sorts of colours, but during the Eighty Years’ War, farmers are said to have crossed and improved them for so long that they could only grow orange carrots. Orange above!
A nice story, which explains why we can still mainly buy orange carrots today: between 1568 and 1648, farmers supposedly started growing orange carrots as an act of resistance, and they quickly became wildly popular as a way to express sympathy for the Princes of Orange. You can read that story on a few websites, and because it is such a funny anecdote, nobody bothers to fact-check it thoroughly.
Total nonsense
With one exception: the magazine Geschiedenis Magazine. Its investigative journalist Daan Couwenbergh delved into the subject and discovered that it is complete nonsense. ‘Scientists have analysed the DNA of carrots, and it has shown that this evidence will never emerge either. The orange carrot is in fact much older than the House of Orange,’ he writes on the website Is Geschiedenis.
Mash away
The Romans ate carrots in every colour of the rainbow, just like those cheerfully coloured carrots you sometimes see at the greengrocer’s today: white, purple, yellow and red. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, carrots were true staple food and were often served at the table. But they were not orange carrots, just as the hutspot made for the Relief of Leiden probably contained mashed white carrots or parsnips rather than carrots.
Patriotism
Orange carrots did become popular, but whether that was due to patriotism, Daan can find no evidence for in his sources. The orange carrots were probably tastier, and they did not bleed an unappetising colour into food, as purple carrots do. Orange carrots were banned from the market for a while, though, Daan writes. ‘When the Patriots forced stadtholder William V to leave The Hague for Nijmegen in 1785, all orange objects were removed from the streetscape. Orange carrots could no longer be sold at The Hague market, unless they had a large bunch of leaves attached to conceal the orange colour somewhat.’
