WTF are purple carrots and where did they come from?

A few weeks ago my husband came home from the grocery store with something mind-blowing: it was a bag of carrots, but in technicolor. Mixed in with the usual orange sticks were yellow carrots, the color of potatoes, and others so deeply purple they were almost black. We cooked them, and I turned over to the dark side.

Purple carrots have been around farmers' markets for a while now, but more recently they've gone mainstream. Pretty soon we might have a full-fledged food fad on our hands. So where did the plum-colored carrot come from, and why is it showing up in my grocery store all of a sudden?

A colorful history

purple carrot cross section

While most of us in America have only ever seen orange carrots (at least until recently), the first cultivated carrots were purple and yellow.

Carrots were domesticated in Afghanistan and spread to the eastern Mediterranean about a thousand years ago. They reached Europe and China in the 1300s. By the early 1500s, orange carrots could be found in Italy, Spain, and Germany. But purple, yellow, red, and white varieties persisted in Asia and the Middle East.

Nobody's really sure how the orange carrot came to take over most of the world. Early reports suggested that purple carrots had a better flavor than white, but purple might have fallen out of favor because they tend to leach a dark pigment onto whatever they're cooked with. After that, orange carrots might have got the jump on white carrots simply because it was easier to grow them.

Purple power

Philipp Simon, a carrot geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is partially responsible for bringing the purple carrot back into our lives. He and his team began working with purple carrots from Syria 35 years ago. They wanted to see if purple carrots harbored any genes that could help make orange carrots resistant to diseases and pests, mostly to help farmers.

“In my wildest dreams I didn't think that this would come back as a color for consumers,” says Simon.

Simon's team found several varieties of purple carrot that were resistant a type of soil nematode that attacks plant roots. Orange carrots have no resistance to these pests, so the USDA spent more than a decade crossing the resistant purple carrots to the orange ones that Americans know and love. The variety that combines the best from both worlds is now available to seed companies and farmers big and small.

Read more at: https://www.popsci.com/wtf-are-purple-carrots-and-where-did-they-come-from