Curated playlist
Root vegetables
- CarrotThe first people to grow carrots did not want the root. They grew it for its leaves and seeds.
- GarlicAncient Greeks left garlic on piles of stones at crossroads as supper for the goddess Hecate.
- PotatoMore than 99% of modern potato varieties come from Chile's lowlands, not Peru's highlands.
- CassavaCassava, a staple for over 800 million people, can kill if prepared badly. Raw roots contain toxic cyanide compounds.
- OnionThe onion has been grown for at least 7,000 years, yet no wild ancestor has ever been found.
- ParsleyParsley seeds take four to six weeks to sprout. A natural germination inhibitor in the seed coat slows them.
- Sweet potatoSweet potatoes were in Polynesia centuries before any European ship arrived.
- TyphaCattails were on the human menu as far back as 30,000 years ago. Grinding stones in Europe show it.
- RadishEach December 23, people in Oaxaca, Mexico, carve radishes into religious figures.
- TurnipAround 1700, "Turnip" Townshend used turnips to keep English livestock alive through winter.
- TaroTaro, the root vegetable that botanists call Colocasia esculenta, reached 18 million tonnes of world production in 2022. Nigeria alone grew 46 percent of that total, far ahead of every other country. The crop ranks fifth among the world's…
- Yam (vegetable)Yam is the common name for certain plants in the genus Dioscorea, and among the Igbo people of south eastern Nigeria it comes with a rule. No one eats the newly harvested tuber until the community has marked the feast called Iri ji ọhụrụ.…
- RutabagaThe rutabaga has its own curling championship. A farmers' market in Ithaca, New York, stages the International Rutabaga Curling Championship every year, on the last day of its market season. In August, the villages of Askov, Minnesota, and…
- Nelumbo nuciferaNelumbo nucifera, the sacred lotus, once grew a living plant from a seed about 1,300 years old, give or take 270 years. Researchers germinated that seed in 1994. Seeds of similar age have been recovered from a dry lakebed in northeastern…