Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Ah, I hadn't known the Alton Brown connection to this notion. Google turned up the fact ("I know it must be true because I read it on teh Intarweb!") that orange came in about 400 years ago when growers in the Netherlands decided to create carrots in their national colour, by breeding them from yellow and red ones. But most references seem to track back to the same VOA story from 2002. (There was also an ABC story that said the same thing, but that still comes down to a mere two sources that may have been based on each other for all I know.) A third source (scroll down a bit more than halfway) (http://forums.egullet.com/lofiversion/index.php/t33732.html) says that, "Black, yellow, purple, white, green, burgandy, and red carrots were the most common hundreds of years ago and orange was acutally rare," and later quotes the aforementioned ABC story as saying that modern orange carrots were bred from pale yellow crossed with red, not from the rare orange carrots of antiquity.

But, of course, we're still in an "I know it must be true because I read it on teh Intarweb" situation.

All of this research comes post-nap and much of it because of your comment, by the way. I haven't gotten around to reading through the Carrot Museum (http://website.lineone.net/~stolarczyk/today.html) web site for more clues.

Still, I must admit that a world containing red, purple, and yellow carrots is easier to imagine than a world containing only boring-coloured carrots, which was what had crossed my sleepy brain when I heard that carrots hadn't always been orange.