Carrots With Character

This week I had the pleasure of meeting the amazing Director of Nutrition Services from the Grafton School Districts named Linda Binder.  I was assigned to shadow her for a day to see what sorts of dilemmas Dietitians deal with when going into school nutrition services as a career.  In between dealing with missing shipments, employees not showing up to work, and bomb threats (yes, I said bomb threats), she was able to share some great healthy food options that she wants to introduce into the Grafton Schools Districts, including one food I had never heard of before: multi-colored carrots.

Now, I'm not talking about a single carrot being multi-colored.  Instead, there are purple, red, yellow, and white carrots that she wants to showcase in the school lunches.

Carrots, shredded in salads and slaws, steamed, or just peeled and dunked in an herb-speckled dip, are versatile veggies that add colorful zest to your dinner plates.  These crunchy root veggies are also a well-known source of vitamin A.  Just a single, full-size carrot more than fulfills an adults daily quotient of the essential vitamin.

But the carrot hasn't always been the vitamin A powerhouse it is today.  Over two decades ago, scientists in the Vegetable Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wisconsin, began a quest to breed carrots packed with beta-carotene (an orange pigment used by the body to create vitamin A).  Thanks largely to this work, today's carrots provide consumers with 75 percent more beta-carotene than those available 25 years ago. 

The researchers haven't limited themselves to the color orange, though.  They've selectively bred a rainbow of carrots, including the colors I stated above: purple, red, yellow, and white.  Scientists are learning that these plant pigments perform a range of protective duties in the human body, which is not surprising, since many of the pigments serve to shield plant cells during photosynthesis.

Red carrots derive their color mainly from lycopene, a type of carotene believed to gaurd against heart disease and some cancers.  Yellow carrots accumulate xanthophylls, pigments similar to beta-carotene that support good eye health.  Purple carrots possess an entirely different class of pigments, anthocyanins, which act as a powerful antioxidant.

While colored carrots are unusual, they're not exactly new.  Purple and yellow carrots were eaten more than 1000 years ago in Afghanistan and 700 years ago in western Europe; but the carrot-breeding process has gone on intensively for just the last 50 years.

Spiced and Roasted Multi-Colored Carrots

3 tbsp olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of cayenne pepper
2 pounds multi-colored carrots, cut diagonally in 2-in pieces
1/4 cup white raisins
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
3 tbsp fresh lemon juice

1.)  Heat oven to 400 F.
2.)  Combine oil, garlic, sugar, cumin, salt, cinnamon, cayenne and carrots in a shallow baking pan.  Roast for 20 minutes or until fork-tender.
3.)  Remove from oven and add raisins, lemon juice, and cilantro.  Toss well.  Serve warm or at room temperature.