Curated playlist
Root vegetables
- CarrotCarrot is one of the most familiar vegetables on earth, yet its story reaches back thousands of years to the mountain ranges of Central Asia, where ancient people had no interest in the root at all. In 2024, world production of carrots…
- GarlicGarlic, known to botanists as Allium sativum, was placed by ancient Greeks on piles of stones at crossroads as a supper for the goddess Hecate. That single ritual captures something true about this plant: for thousands of years, it has…
- PotatoThe potato is a starchy tuber that pre-Columbian farmers domesticated around Lake Titicaca between roughly 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. They worked from a wild species in the S. brevicaule complex, in what is now southern Peru and…
- CassavaCassava feeds more than 800 million people worldwide. It is the third-largest source of carbohydrates in the tropics, sitting behind only rice and maize. Yet the root at the center of all this nourishment carries a hidden danger:…
- 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. Nobody can point to a wild plant in some forgotten valley and say: that is where it all…
- ParsleyParsley, or garden parsley, carries the scientific name Petroselinum crispum, and it has been quietly anchoring kitchens across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas for thousands of years. The plant is native to the Balkans, yet it…
- 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 it existed. It is one of the few food crops that can honestly claim to have…
- TyphaTypha is a genus of about 30 species of flowering plants that most people have seen without knowing the name. You might call them cattails, bulrushes, reedmace, punks, or cumbungi, depending on where you grew up. New Zealanders know them…
- RadishA German botanist in 1544 claimed to have seen radishes weighing 100 pounds and stretching roughly 3 feet long. That report sounds like a tall tale. Yet the radish, a flowering plant in the mustard family Brassicaceae, really does range…
- 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 millennia crossing continents. It is a root vegetable grown in temperate climates…