Why are carrots orange? It is political
nextnature.net
nextnature.net
"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"
People + Food + Color = weird.
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.
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 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.)
'Tis just speculation, though. There are plenty of weird / weirder things in the world.
Thoughts from a chemist here.
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.
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.
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.
Not in Germany. I so which they had more real bread here in the UK.
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).