The History of Carrots

There's not really such thing as a carrot in the wild. The first ever carrots 5,000 years ago would have been related to parsley and they would have had roots that people would have eaten. Fast forward a couple of thousand years and now carrots are quite popular in Europe around the 10th century. But again these carrots, they were purple, yellow, they would have looked a bit like a small parsnip. So how did we end up with orange carrots that are kind of sweet, the carrots that we know today? They come from the Netherlands specifically around the 15th century because the royal family in the Netherlands then was the house of orange. And this is where I'm