• Question: why were carrots purple before they were orange ?

    Asked by anon-176119 to Mark, Jenny on 22 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Mark Kirkwood

      Mark Kirkwood answered on 22 Jun 2018:

      Interesting question!

      I didn’t realise carrots were purple before now, so thanks for the fact!

      The real question is, why did we make perfectly good purple carrots into orange ones? 😀

      They used to be smaller, less sweet, and the purple colour was created by a chemical called anthocyanin. It’s thought that the farmers started mixing the purple carrots with other colour carrots like yellow, and eventually ended up with orange ones. This process is called “selective breeding”, where you mix two things to try and get something new that has the best bits of both!
      Then, people liked the bigger, sweeter, orange carrots best, and these are the ones that stuck around!

      Selective breeding is used in all sorts of places. For example, did you know that all the different types of dogs you see today, pretty much came from one type of wolf, many years ago?
      It was people who selectively bred the dogs with slightly different looks/body types/behaviours until they started to turn into all the different breeds you see today. AMazing!

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