Curated category
Leaf vegetables
- CabbageCabbage has been at the human table for longer than written history can fully account for, and the word itself carries ancient weight.
- ChardChard goes by many names -- silver beet, perpetual spinach, seakale beet, leaf beet -- yet behind all those aliases sits a single plant with a history…
- OnionThe onion, Allium cepa, is the most widely cultivated species of an entire genus of vegetables, yet its ancestral wild form has never been found.
- SpinachSpinach is not a better source of dietary iron than many other vegetables. That fact would surprise the cartoon sailor Popeye, who has spent decades downing…
- ParsleyParsley, or garden parsley, carries the scientific name Petroselinum crispum, and it has been quietly anchoring kitchens across Europe, the Middle East, and…
- Sweet potatoThe sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, carries a name that is older than written history and a journey that crossed entire oceans before Europeans had any idea…
- Chili pepperChili peppers have been shaping human diets since roughly 7,500 BC, making them one of the oldest cultivated crops in the Americas.
- TurnipThe turnip, known scientifically as Brassica rapa subsp. rapa, reached Japan by the year 700 CE - a quiet milestone for a vegetable that had already spent…
- CeleryCelery is a plant so ordinary that most people slice it without a second thought. Yet in ancient Greece, athletes who won the sacred Nemean Games were…
- KaleKale is a leaf cabbage that spent most of the 20th century in the United States doing almost nothing that had to do with food.