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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The carrot is a root vegetable, now usually orange. The first cultivated carrots, grown in Central Asia more than a thousand years ago, were mostly purple or yellow. Orange carrots were developed later and became common in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, from where they spread across Europe.[1] The carrot is therefore orange only because it was asked to be, and has been very consistent about it since.
Carrots contain beta-carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A, needed for healthy eyes. But eating carrots does not let a person see in the dark. The idea was spread widely in Britain during the Second World War, when the government publicised carrots as the reason its pilots were so good at night, partly to encourage people to eat home-grown vegetables and partly to avoid drawing attention to the new radar systems.[2]
People who ate a great many carrots in the hope of seeing in the dark did not see in the dark. Some of them turned slightly orange, which is harmless and, in a way, fair.
Purple, yellow, white and red carrots are still grown and are sold as “heritage” carrots, a description that makes the purple carrot the older one and the orange carrot the newcomer, a situation the purple carrot has waited three hundred years to point out.