Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Cruciferous Vegetables

Starting point is 00:00:00 One of the most common food items consumed today are cruciferous vegetables. Even if you aren't familiar with the term, you almost certainly have consumed some before, and there's a good chance you do so on a regular basis. What many people don't know is that these vegetables are actually rather modern. Early Neolithic humans never ate broccoli, cabbage, or Brussels sprouts because humans invented these foods. Learn more about cruciferous vegetables and where they came from on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. your perceptions about the past were wrong.

Starting point is 00:00:45 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. If you're not familiar with the term cruciferous vegetable, then you're almost certainly familiar with cruciferous vegetables themselves. Cruciferous vegetables are an entire category of vegetables that includes a wide variety of plants that seem, at first, to be very different. Without going through an exhaustive list, here are some cruciferous vegetables that you might be

Starting point is 00:01:28 familiar with. Cale. Collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, red cabbage, colerabi, Chinese kale, and savoy cabbage. And that list isn't even close to being comprehensive, but it demonstrates the wide-known of very common vegetables that are considered to be cruciferous vegetables. So why are they called cruciferous vegetables? It comes from the Latin word cruchiferae, which means crossbearing, which is due to the four leaves the plants have and how they're arranged. Many of the vegetables I've listed like broccoli are ones that you might have consumed without ever having seen their

Starting point is 00:02:06 leaves. All of these vegetables are plants in the family Brassacase. In addition to these vegetables I've listed, it includes mustard plants and plants such as rapeseed, which is what canola oil is made out of. However, this episode is really about one particular species in the family. Brassica, a la racia. You probably haven't heard of Brasica aleracia, and you probably haven't eaten it, but without it, the foods we know today would be very different. Brassica aleracia can be found in the wild across southern and western Europe. It's a leafy plant that if you saw it on the ground, you'd probably think that it was just a large weed. It's a biennial plant that has a two-year growing cycle. In the first year, it stores nutrients and water in its large leaves, and in the

Starting point is 00:02:51 second year, it creates a very tall flower spike that can grow as large as six feet or two meters. The plant is relatively salt-tolerant, but it doesn't tolerate other plants growing in proximity. Brassica aleracea typically only grows along cliffs made of limestone. The plant can commonly be found along the chalk cliffs in Dover, England, and likewise, many plants can be found along the coast of France. So what does this cliff-dwelling European plant have to do with anything? Every single vegetable that I previously just listed is derived from Brassica Alaracia. Or, to put it another way, none of those vegetables I listed are found in nature. There's no such thing as wild broccoli, cabbage, or cauliflower. It's possible you could come across a feral version of it, which some

Starting point is 00:03:39 somehow came from a seed on a farm, but they never existed in the wild. Well, if that's the case, then how and why do these plants exist? That story is what makes cruciferous vegetables so interesting. Humans began cultivating Brassica aleracia thousands of years ago. We aren't sure exactly when or where it happened, but it began one of the most successful cases of human selective breeding of plants. Most people don't realize that almost all of the crops that we consumed today are nothing like the wild varieties that were first cultivated. There were no big

Starting point is 00:04:15 juicy apples or oranges out in the forest, and there were no ears of corn the size of what you see today. The humans who cultivated Brassica Alaracia simply collected the seeds from the plants that they liked and kept planting them. Even without knowing it, they were engaging in selective breeding. The very first of these crops that was probably created was cabbage. Cabbage was first developed sometime around the year 1000 BC, most probably by Celtic people who lived in Western Europe. However, there are theories that place the origin of cabbage along the Mediterranean coast. The ancient Greeks and Romans highly valued cabbage for its health benefits and versatility in cooking. The Romans in particular developed several varieties of cabbage and included it in their

Starting point is 00:05:01 diet for both medicinal and culinary purposes. The Romans really had a thing for cabbage. Pliny the Elder mentions a treatise on cabbage that was written by the Greek physician Christophis of Nidos. However, that text has been lost to history. Pliny the Elder also mentions seven different cabbage varieties that were being grown in Rome at the time. Emperor Diocletian, after bringing stability to the entire Roman Empire, decided to retire to grow cabbages. When people begged him to return to power to restore leadership from Emperor Constantine, he reportedly said, quote, If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor,

Starting point is 00:05:42 he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed. End quote. The cabbage grown and consumed by the Romans was probably something closer to kale than the modern version with densely packed leaves in the shape of a sphere. The first mention that makes a distinction between harder head cabbage and looser kale didn't occur until the 13th century, and by the 14th century, records in England may clear a distinction between the two types of cabbage. In the Middle Ages, cabbage was a food for both the rich

Starting point is 00:06:15 and the poor, it was easy to grow, and in warmer climates, it could actually be grown almost year-round. Cabbage and kale may have been the first cruciferous vegetables to have been cultivated, but they were hardly the only ones. As more cabbage and kale varieties were selectively bred, more vegetables were created as well. Collared greens are a type of kale, and some form of them date back over 2,000 years. Kolarabi, whose name in German means cabbage turnip, was first documented as having come to Italy in 1536.

Starting point is 00:06:48 Some early forms of broccoli and cauliflower certainly existed in ancient Rome, but we have no idea how close it was to the type we have today. We don't know if cauliflower, for example, was independently created from other types of cabbage, or if it came from broccoli. cauliflower certainly does look like white broccoli, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one was derived from the other.

Starting point is 00:07:11 The Romans knew a variety of cabbage called Kaima. Kaima found its way to the island of Cyprus, where it was then reintroduced back in Italy around 1490. Broccoli most probably came from the Roman varieties of cabbage, and it remained in Italy for centuries, where it underwent more selective breeding. It isn't recorded as having left Italy until the 18th century. If you remember in one of my episodes, the name broccoli came from an Italian family that introduced the vegetable to the United States,

Starting point is 00:07:42 and members of the broccoli family were responsible for producing the James Bond films. Brussels sprouts are derived from older forms of cabbage as well, and as their name would suggest, the varieties we know, or at least something similar, were first created around the city of Brussels in the 13th century. It might seem odd that all of these vegetables are derived from the same plant, but it's true. However, the story is actually even stranger. The list of vegetables I gave you at the start of this episode was not complete. There are even more cruciferous vegetables that are not directly descended from Brassica Alaracia. Horse radish, radishes, turnips, Ruta Bega, white mustard, black mustard, brown mustard, watercrest, wasabi, arugula, and marugula, and

Starting point is 00:08:29 many others. Most of these were selectively bred from two other species, Brassica Rapa and Brassica Nigra. One of the reasons so many varieties of cruciferous vegetables were able to be created from just a small number of original plants is something called the Triangle of Yu. The U in the Triangle of U.S. Jiangchung, a Korean botanist who studied plants in the Brassacari family in the early 20th century. The triangle of U is a concept used in plant genetics to understand the relations and origins of crops within the brassica genus. Imagine a triangle where each corner of the triangle represents one of the three ancestral wild species of the brassica genus, Brassica Rapa, Brasica Nigra, and Brasica Oloracia. The sides of the triangle represent the hybrid species that are

Starting point is 00:09:20 created when two of the ancestral species are crossed. The triangle can explain how crossbreeding can occur and how new varietals can arise in addition to the selective breeding of individual species. While these vegetables have been selectively bred for centuries, efforts in this area haven't stopped. Centuries ago, the crops spread to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and new varietals were created there too. Bakshoy, for example, also known as Chinese cabbage, is descended from this original line. New cruciferous vegetables have been created recently, too. Brocolini is a cross between broccoli and Chinese kale, also known as Gailan. Komatsuna is a leafy Japanese offshoot of Brasicarapa.

Starting point is 00:10:05 In 1992, Dutch researchers identified the chemical in Brussels sprouts that made them bitter, and then selectively bred versions to remove the bitterness and taste better. Of course, as with almost all crops, varietals were created with attributes, including increased production, cold weather and insect resistance, and better nutritional profile. I should note that not every green leafy vegetable is a cruciferous vegetable. Lettuce and spinach, for example, are not. Cruciferous vegetables differ from one another, but they are widely considered to be good

Starting point is 00:10:37 sources of vitamin C and soluble fiber. Cruciferous vegetables are a staple food in many people's diets, and they are some of the most common crops that people grow in their own gardens. The amazing thing is that the large number of diverse plants that all seem so different from each other are all actually the descendants of a few ancient plant species. They became so different because of the continued selective breeding efforts by humans over thousands of years who simply wanted to make better crops. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiever. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone

Starting point is 00:11:18 who supports a show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in Everything Everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified to future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Cruciferous Vegetables

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.