Carrots never gave pilots night vision; radar did, and wartime propaganda hid it
During the Second World War, Britain spread the story that carrots helped its pilots see in the dark. It was cover for the real secret, radar. The vegetable itself has a stranger past than the myth: early carrots were grown in Iran for their leaves and seeds, and English speakers once barely told them from parsnips.
The garden carrot descends from a wild plant that grows across Europe and the southwest of Asia. Written history and molecular genetics both point to a single domestication in Central Asia, with Greater Persia still the centre of wild carrot diversity. Over centuries, growers selected for less bitterness, more sweetness and a smaller woody core. Carl Linnaeus named the wild species Daucus carota in 1753, and the cultivated subspecies, sativus, got its accepted name in 1834.
Orange carrots owe their colour to beta-carotene, which makes them rich in vitamin A, but heirloom types can be white, yellow, red, purple or even black. The English word appeared around 1530, borrowed from French, and ultimately goes back to an Indo-European root meaning horn, for the root's shape. As a colour term it first described yellowish-red hair around 1670. Bitterness comes mainly from a compound called falcarindiol, which also fights certain fungi.
Carrots are biennials. In the first year the plant banks energy in its taproot; in the second it spends that store on flowering. A good root has plenty of pulpy outer cortex relative to the inner core, and roots range from 5 to 50 cm long. The flower head is a compound umbel: a large primary one can hold up to 50 smaller umbellets, each with up to 50 tiny white flowers. Each flower sheds pollen before its own stigma is ready, which discourages self-fertilisation, and a single plant may bloom for 30 to 50 days. As seeds ripen, the umbel curls inward until it looks like a bird's nest.
Genetically the carrot is modest: nine pairs of short chromosomes and a genome of about 473 million base pairs, roughly the size of rice's. Its output is not modest. In 2022 world production of carrots and turnips together passed 42 million tonnes, with China growing 44 percent.
Source: Carrot
