Were carrots originally purple?
The first cultivated carrots were purple and yellow. Orange is a newcomer that caught on in Europe around the 16th century.
Curries, stir-fries, salads and stews: the bright orange of a carrot adds a splash of color to all kinds of dishes. In picture books and cartoons alike, a carrot is simply orange.
Over the long history of the carrot, though, orange is a fairly new color. You may have heard that “carrots were originally purple.” That claim is about half right.
Wild carrots were whitish
The carrot’s ancestor is the wild carrot, which grows widely from Europe to western Asia. It is a weed with lacy white flowers, and its root is pale, thin and tough.
Seeds of wild carrot thousands of years old have been found at archaeological sites in Switzerland and southern Germany. But people back then are thought to have used mainly the fragrant seeds and leaves. The carrot as a root vegetable came much later.
The first cultivated carrots were purple and yellow
Carrots grown for their roots are believed to have first been cultivated about 1,100 years ago, around the 10th century, in Central Asia, in the region of present-day Afghanistan.
Those early fields held purple and yellow carrots. The purple comes from anthocyanins, the same kind of pigment found in grape and eggplant skins. Carrots then spread westward and were being grown in Europe by around the 12th century. Europeans seem to have preferred the yellow ones over the purple, probably because they tasted better.
So the first cultivated carrots were not “just purple” but purple and yellow. That is why the old saying is only half right.
Orange arrived in 16th-century Europe
Orange carrots appeared in western Europe around the 15th or 16th century. In 2023, a research team including scientists at North Carolina State University published an analysis of the genomes of 630 carrot varieties in the journal Nature Plants. They concluded that orange carrots probably arose from white and yellow carrots, and that for the root to pile up large amounts of beta-carotene, three genes all had to be “switched off.”
It was Dutch growers who refined orange carrots into established varieties. A variety called Long Orange, recorded in the early 18th century, is regarded as an ancestor of many of today’s orange carrots.
A popular story says the Dutch bred orange carrots in honor of William of Orange, who led the Dutch revolt for independence. There is no solid evidence for this. Another suggestion is that purple carrots turn soups and stews a murky color when cooked, so the better-looking orange ones won out.
Two kinds of carrot in Japan
Carrots reached Japan by two routes. The first, the Eastern type, arrived by way of China in the late 16th to 17th century. These were long and slender and came in many colors, including red, white, yellow and purple. The second was the orange Western type, which came from Europe and the United States between the end of the Edo period (1603–1868) and the Meiji era that followed.
Western carrots, which are easier to grow, spread as Japanese diets became more Westernized, and after the Second World War they became the norm. Only a handful of Eastern types are still grown in Japan today, such as the deep red kintoki carrot used in New Year dishes. Its red is not beta-carotene but lycopene, the same pigment that colors tomatoes.