A CARROT lobster. Very Maine. And also very much Dutch.
Roughly 2 billion lbs of carrots are grown in America annually (whereas Maine catches a hundred million lbs of lobsters). An average of 8 carrots go into a pound, so you do the math as to what kind of mountain that must be. Most carrots are now grown in California and Washington state, with Texas as a solid runner-up.
America has known carrots since the first Dutch brought them with them. The oldest carrot is the Early Horn, because it’s generally assumed that they were initially shipped from the Dutch town of Hoorn. It was a somewhat bulky carrot, not the pretty slender one that in America came to be known as the Long Orange. Regardless, almost all carrots that America consumes today, whether slim or corpulent, stem from the Horn version.
HISTORIANS like to bicker among themselves, they don’t always see eye to eye – even though everyone knows that carotene is good for your vision. Carrots, most agree, only turned orange after Dutch farmers decided to make them orange. It was a tribute, a golden age thing, just around the time when Dutch immigrants started to populate America. The farmers were proud of the man who had fought and died for Dutch independence, Willem of Orange. They experimented with beta-carotene until they turned the carrot, which had previously always been purple or white, a bright orange.
The previously ugly carrot now became a lot more appetizing to look at – and to bite into. And how seriously Holland connected the orange carrots with the House of Orange, became apparent later when half the nation turned sour on its princes for a while, the time period between Willem V and the first King Willem I. Carrots were banned, due to their “offensive” tribute to the House of Orange.
NOT ALL historians agree on their origin, but the fact remains that the orange carrots were introduced to America by ships from Hoorn, and that the name stuck. So did the orange in the flags of both the city and the state of New York, and in the logos of the Yankees, the Mets and the Knicks, the Boston Bruins, the New York Islanders ice hockey team, the city of Albany and the New York Police Department. Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn, even Staten Island: they all carry the Dutch orange in their flags and coats of arms.
For the record, all this flag orange was mainly meant as a tribute to Willem’s great-grandson, Prince Willem III who also became king of England and therefore by default king of America – the most popular king America ever had. No one would have considered calling him Long Orange, because Willem measured below average, he was a head shorter than his wife Mary. But the carrot was for Gramps, for Early Willem. Therefore, every time you chew on a carrot, you salute Willem of Orange.
