← Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Cruciferous Vegetables (Encore)
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Learn more about how Cruciferous Vegetables came to be
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Gary Arndt
The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily 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. This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash. With Stash, there's no more confusing, frustrating gatekeeping to keep you from investing. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster. 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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 familiar kale, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, Chinese kale, and savoy cabbage. And that list isn't even close to being comprehensive, but it demonstrates the wide number of very common vegetables that are to be cruciferous vegetables. So why are they called cruciferous vegetables? It comes from the Latin word cruciferae, which means cross bearing, 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 leaves. All of these vegetables are plants in the family Brassicaceae. 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 Brassica oleracea. You probably haven't heard of Brassica oleracea and you probably haven't eaten it, but without it, the foods we know today would be very different. Brassica oleracea 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 second year it creates a very tall flower spike that can grow as large as 6ft or 2 meters. The plant is relatively salt tolerant, but it doesn't tolerate other plants growing in proximity. Brassica oleracea 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 oleracea, 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 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 oleracea 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 consume today are nothing like the wild varieties that were first cultivated. There were no big 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 oleracea 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 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 Christophus of Knidos. 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, if you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never satisfied greed. 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 the distinction between harder head cabbage and looser kale didn't occur until the 13th century. And by the 14th century, records in England make clear a distinction between the two types of cabbage. In the Middle Ages, cabbage was a food for both the rich 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. Collard greens are a type of kale, and some form of them date back over 2000 years. Kohlrabi, whose name in German means cabbage turnip, was first documented as having come to Italy in 1536. 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. The Romans knew a variety of cabbage called Caema caima 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, 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. Horseradish, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, white mustard, black mustard, brown mustard, watercress, wasabi, arugula, and many others. Most of these were selectively bred from two other 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 Yew. The yew in the Triangle of Yew refers to Dr. Yujiang Chung, a Korean botanist who studied plants in the Brassicari family in the early 20th century. The triangle of view 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, Brassica rapa, Brassica nigra, and Brassica oleracea. The sides of the triangle represent the hybrid species that are 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. Bok choy, for example, also known as Chinese cabbage, is descended from this original line. New cruciferous vegetables have been created recently, too. Broccolini is a cross between broccoli and Chinese kale, also known as Gailan komatsuna, is a leafy Japanese offshoot of brassica rapa. 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 profiles. 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 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 Austin Oakton and Cameron Kieffer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server. If you'd like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes and as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.