The harvest season is upon us right now. Orange, yellow, and brown are the acceptable colours. Jokes about pumpkin spice are plentiful. Canada has a delightful fall. The distinct division between autumn and winter helps prevent the march of holiday madness into October. Christmas means freezing temperatures and the chance of snow. Fall means Orange.
Apparently fall can mean purple as well. Last April, my partner and I were expanding our vegetable garden by buying seeds from a local homesteader. I was petting a farm cat when she asked me what colour carrots we should get. Thinking this was a joke, I said I preferred the orange ones. What other colours could there even be? Well, purple yellow and white are three of several colour options. It turns out that carrots come in a wide variety. So why aren’t they ever seen in the grocery store or on a salad?
The cynical answer is that consumers are too stupid to recognize a carrot if its not orange. Alternatively, maybe food suppliers just assume we are, and never stock non-orange carrots. The real reason is probably just rampant ignorance. There is not much difference between colours of carrot, so there isn’t really any motivation to push the variety. White carrot vendors are not suffering.
A pile of orange root vegetables says “carrots”. The same pile randomly coloured says “what the hell is this?”
Language evolves to fit the users. Every year, Websters Dictionary adds new words to its lexicon, with annual displeasure from pedantic people. Is ‘yo’ a word? Is ‘selfie’ worthy of the dictionary? How do you spell ‘through’ (thru)? People are quick to forget the slow change they participate in. The word ‘describe’ used to be written ‘descrive’. Over time that ‘V’ sound was replaced by a ‘B’, and now that IS the word. In Shakespeare’s time, people didn’t even have participial words, so they had to say “what do you read?” not “what are you reading?”
So carrots: grocery store owners and customers gradually demonstrated a familiarity with orange varieties, and now that is what a carrot looks like.
Also, the inside of the purple carrots was as orange as ever.