"I repeat, orange carrots were never developed solely to honor the royal family. But it seems the carrot came first and the independent country, second. Orange carrots were later used by the Dutch state to reinforce the burgeoning nation’s national color, said Stolarczyk, which could explain where the rumored connection between William of Orange and the carrot comes from. "Places like France, Germany and England received orange carrots first, presumably liked them and they became the norm," Stolarczyk said. "The orange variety grew very well in climates and environments, better than purple and yellow, and were more yielding, stable, uniform and reliable," Stolarczyk said.ĭutch merchants then spread the orange produce across the continent. This know-how allowed them to propagate orange carrots in large quantities, which seemed to thrive in the Netherlands' mild, wet weather. Why do some fruits and vegetables conduct electricity?įlash forward a couple of centuries and the Dutch were one of the main agricultural forces of 16th-century Europe.
Can eating too many carrots turn you orange? What's the difference between a fruit and a vegetable? There are documents in Spain that show the cultivation of orange and purple carrots as far back as the medieval period, in the 14th-century, Stolarczyk said.
There's a school of thought, Stolarczyk told Live Science, that orange carrot seeds were first introduced to Europe by Islamic traders moving between the Ottoman Empire’s North African territories and the Iberian Peninsula some 200 years before William of Orange began stirring up political insurrection in the Netherlands. Yellow carrots in the Western group probably mutated into more orange hues, which farmers then selectively planted. These domesticated carrots were later split into two main classes: the Asiatic group, which was cultivated around the Himalayas, and the Western group, which grew largely in the Middle East and Turkey. Wild carrots started off as either white or pale yellow, but changed to purple and yellow when people first domesticated the vegetable almost 5,000 years ago in the Persian Plateau area, according to a 2011 report that Stolarczyk co-authored. A portrait of William of Orange (Image credit: Shutterstock)
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