"Though the stabilised orange carrot does date from around seventeenth century Netherlands, it is unlikely that honouring William of Orange had anything to do with it"
We've started getting yellow carrots in the Woodmans nearby. They're very clearly targeted because of their non-orange color, but they're quite good (partly because the brand carries good carrots, but these are a little sweeter).
Some foodstuffs company whose name I've forgotten tried to introduce yellow ketchup in my area a couple of years ago, but they failed pretty badly. I bought a bottle, and while it tasted just like the the red stuff, it just didn't look right. My 5 year old niece just flat out refused to eat it.
Yeah, and remember the green (and purple) Heinz sales? They didn't last long.
At the cost of duplicating my other comment, it fits here perfectly:
I hate to cry conspiracy theory, but I really do think that American culture in particular has been groomed to think and eat this way by food suppliers. When you can color / bleach something, you can hide flaws.
"I hate to cry conspiracy theory, but I really do think that American culture in particular has been groomed to think and eat this way by food suppliers."
I tend to consider conspiracy theories a last resort. It is not that they are never true, just that reaching for them first is a mental crutch. In this case, I would suggest that given the importance of food, one would rather expect evolutionary considerations to dominate how we feel about food colorations. It may be true that making food "look good" can be used to hide flaws, but I seriously doubt the concept of "looking good" comes from training. I would imagine it mostly comes from genes and common-sense-type-training.
(I assert this without proof, which is why I mentioned my conspiracy-theory metric. My point is that I don't see a need for the conspiracy theory choice here.)
Yeah, I generally agree. And the evolutionary standpoint makes sense, and is the logical counter to this. My main focus there isn't that we equate the two, it's that there's such a strong connection. At least, as far as I can see. It could've grown from "that sells better, what if we do this", but it's still kinda strange, and I wonder if it's at least partly intentional.
'Tis just speculation, though. There are plenty of weird / weirder things in the world.
As probably one of very few HN readers to have made my own ketchup (all you need is time, a kettle, and a farmstand, preferably selling seconds), I can say that dark red is your basic ketchup color if you start with red tomatoes. Purple sounds like heirloom, and at farmers market prices you'd be approaching the price per volume of very good wine.
I'm not sure you'd ever get purple ketchup even with purple tomatoes. Usually the purple pigments in food disappear after heating them. Do you think that'd be any different in tomatoes?
I think it depends on the particular kind of pigment. Purple berries typically stay purple when cooked, which is why blackberry pie is still purple, and eggplants stay purple also. Beets turn red, though, since the purple pigment degrades while the red one doesn't.
Not sure where purple tomatoes would fall. Some googling turns up anthocyanin as the pigment, and Wikipedia says it's water-soluble (so would leach out if the fruit is boiled and the water not retained), and changes color based on pH.
I've had "heirloom" carrots a few times in Portland, OR. White and red ones, and all sorts of funky shapes. So they're coming back, the way heirloom varieties of other commoditized vegetables and fruits have (tomatoes, peppers, apples, berries, wild greens ...)
Orange carrots express beta carotene, purple carrots express anthocyanins, red carrots express lycopene in addition to some alpha- and beta-carotenes, and white carrots express few or no pigments.
I believe one way to produce an orange carrot from the conventional horticulture of purple, red, and white carrots, is to supress lycopene production in red carrots, leaving just carotene. Another way would be to take a faint orange (perhaps technically white) carrot and cause it to express those orange pigments at the high levels that purple carrots do.
We grow white carrots in our garden. They have a much smoother and much less earthy taste when raw. My kids love them pulled right out of the ground and washed off with the hose.
My understanding is there was no word in English for the word orange before the fruit was widely introduced in Europe. In other words the fruit gave the name to the color, not vice versa. (Other orange colored things were usually called 'ginger' or 'red-yellow'.)
The history of color words is a really interesting topic. For example, in Turkish the word for "brown" is kahverengi, which literally translates as "coffee-colored". Also, turquoise comes from the French word for Turkish, used to describe the color commonly used on Ottoman glassware.
Indoctrination. Look at how much color is added to food. The reddest ketchups sell better, as do the yellowest mustards, and the whitest breads.
I hate to cry conspiracy theory, but I really do think that American culture in particular has been groomed to think and eat this way by food suppliers. When you can color / bleach something, you can hide flaws.
Me too, I've found a "stone-ground" brown that's phenomenal. I'm forever converted from the yellow stuff.
Generally speaking, though, people buy what's most pure-colored. Just look at what has the most shelf-space at a (normal) grocery store. And add in packaging designs, most of them favor large areas of a fairly pure color. Our food-color connection is pretty strongly ground in and then reinforced all over the place.
Here's an alternative theory: orange carrots contain more carotene, which is good for your brain, so it's evolution doing its job. (edit: OTOH maybe the red carrots contain even more carotene, but too much carotene causes cancer, so that's why we don't like them ;)
When I saw that picture I was actually fascinated to try the dark purple, beet-like carrots. They looked the tastiest to me.
The others seemed mildly less appetizing but still edible, and in fact I've seen white carrots before (they were wild and I didn't eat them, but they smelled nice).
"Though the stabilised orange carrot does date from around seventeenth century Netherlands, it is unlikely that honouring William of Orange had anything to do with it"