What’s your favorite vegetable? Potatoes and carrots are neck and neck in the worldwide surveys. But there are several hundred varieties of carrots and they are not all orange. They were originally purple, indigo, yellow, red and white. The predominance of orange carrots is the result of Dutch cultivation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – perhaps because patriotic farmers crossed and recrossed orange varieties of carrots to stabilize their color to match the national flag in honor of William of Orange.