The Surprising Origins and Definitions of Vegetables Explained

tomatoes are vegetables now i know what i just said might be controversial but hear me out

unlike fruits which have a very clear botanical definition being the seed bearing structures of any

flowering plants the definition of vegetables is much more general and includes any part of a plant that humans

eat not only does this mean that fruits are technically included

under the term vegetable but this also includes edible seeds flowers leaves stems and roots however

from a culinary perspective these definitions aren't very useful

on the one hand plants typically produce fruits so that animals carry them away and

eat them in the process spreading their seeds far and wide to accomplish this fruits are typically

made soft sweet and edible in their raw form on the other hand the rest of the plant

is not supposed to be eaten as this actively decreases its chances of reproduction

and therefore the seeds flowers leaves stems and roots all come with some form of defense against

being eaten like tough skins bitter tastes hard shells and so on the only way to make these parts edible

is through some form of preparation be it cooking baking boiling blanching or whatever

this has led to fruits and all other vegetables having two very different functions

in our foods bringing us back to the tomato while yes technically the tomato is the

seed bearing structure of a flowering plant making it in actuality a fruit it's pretty rare for people to actually

eat them like a fruit i mean don't get me wrong you totally can eat a raw tomato if you want to

nothing bad will happen except it might taste pretty gross which is why most people prefer to cook

tomatoes as if it were a vegetable because well technically it is what i'm trying

to show you by explaining all of this is that while coming up with a list of fruits to do a geography of

video is rather straightforward doing the same for vegetables isn't as easy as the term just includes

too much since i can't go through everything some people either may or may not

consider to be vegetables the only option left for me is to pick and choose only the things

i consider to be vegetables and just suffer the endless comments i'm sure to get telling me everything i missed

so knowing that let's get started being from the united states my knowledge of vegetables is largely going

to reflect foods of european tradition as such it only makes a sense to start by looking at europe

if you watched my geography of spices video you'd know that most foods from europe had their origin in the highly

diverse mediterranean region and vegetables are no different it was here that the wild cardoon first

arose with its impressive but spiky flower what's even crazier is that at some point someone looked at that and

said to themselves i bet i could eat it and eventually managed to breed it into a more fleshy less

spiky form giving birth to the modern artichoke also belonging to this broadly

mediterranean category is arugula while today it's mainly the leaves of the plant that we eat you can

also make use of its flowers as well as both its young and fully mature seeds but be careful

ever since ancient roman times arugula was thought to be a strong aphrodisiac capable of reviving drowsy venus

whatever that means it's thought that this is why it started to be mixed with lettuce as it was

thought to have the opposite effect ironically lettuce which had a huge native range spanning from

europe to siberia was first domesticated in ancient egypt where it was most closely

associated with men the god of reproduction as it was believed to well also help with reviving that drowsy

venus this actually appears to be a trend with another supposed aphrodisiac from the mediterranean being asparagus

though no one really knows why it was so common to associate vegetables with one's ability to

canoodle if i had to hazard a guess people who ate their vegetables were simply healthier than those who didn't

which makes all sorts of things easier aside from making your urine smell worse than it already did asparagus is also

notable for being one of only a few common vegetables where it is the stem of the plant that we mainly eat with the

only other one from the mediterranean being celery though this only partially counts

not only because the leaves and seeds of celery are also used to make spices but it was also only around the 1950s that

we finally figured out a way to get people to eat celery by making it into ants

on a log it was also in this region that peas first emerged though these come in two main varieties classic

green peas as well as yellow peas and if you've ever taken a biology class you'll probably know that it was by breeding

yellow and green peas together that gregor mendel first came to understand patterns of

inheritance observing the yellow trait to be dominant and the green trait to be recessive what this means is that peas

have actually been purposefully bred this way i guess revealing our preference for

green above yellow while technically a whole pea pod qualifies as a fruit individual peas are

seeds meaning we've covered all the major vegetable groups except for roots these are tricky because a lot of

the time people don't start by eating a plant's roots you know the only part that comes buried in the ground and

covered in dirt instead root vegetables tend to be first grown for

some other edible aspect of the plant and only after some time do farmers realize that the root is edible as well

this is exactly what happened with beets which were initially grown throughout the mediterranean for their leaves which

today we'd call charred it was only after this that the plant's roots were noticed for their

size and their ability to be eaten the story is the same for turnips where it was in northern europe that they were

again first harvested for their leaves before people realized that their large taproot was edible as well

but ok it's at this point that i need to bring up the true mvp of european vegetables brassica

oleracea otherwise known as wild cabbage in its wild form the plant makes use of its

high salt tolerance to grow along the coastlines of south and western europe

where few other plants can inhabit given its wide natural distribution a number of different people groups would

come to encounter and cultivate their own forms of brassica the most obvious is of course

cabbage which was selectively bred for its large edible leaves and the dense head that it forms in the first year of

being planted eventually however the people living in southern italy and

sicily began to prefer the edible flowers that brassica grew and over time developed their own cultivar we now know

as broccoli a very similar thing happened on the island of cyprus where it was again the flowering

head of the plant that was selectively bred resulting in broccoli's better tasting pale twin

cauliflower from here cauliflower went on its very own journey first being bred back into a green variant known as

broccoflower by the 16th century this green variant made it back to italy where further

breeding led its flower to develop into a fractal pattern resulting in what we'd call romanesco cauliflower

which might win the prize for the craziest looking vegetable in existence 300 years after that in 1970 a new

mutation in cauliflower was first noticed in ontario canada which led to the plant developing

a yellowish color seeds of this initial mutant were sent to geneva new york where the new york

state agricultural experimentation station is located and after a few years of crossing and

recrossing this variant with regular cauliflower a new cultivar containing 25 percent

more beta-carotene was produced turning the vegetable orange in the process this only opened the door for

even more experimentation and not long afterward the purple cauliflower was produced altogether

making the cauliflower family surprisingly colorful but okay back to brassica roman farmers

again started to play around with the genetics experimenting with shrinking the cabbage head

as roman armies expanded across europe so too did their crops and this is how a small variant of cabbage made it all the

way to belgium where it was further bred until a new kind of cabbage was cultivated which grew many small heads

on a tall stock because these tiny cabbages were closely associated with belgium and

specifically the city of brussels everyone in europe began calling them you guessed it brussels sprouts

the ancient greeks had the opposite idea choosing instead to focus on growing out the plants leaves without a head

resulting in the cultivation of both kale and collard greens all together 13 different vegetables have been

produced through the brassica olaricea plant however food is one of those things that

humans just can't get enough of and so despite what plants started out on the continent europeans historically

imported food from all over the world but with europe contained by the sahara to the south the atlantic to the west

and the arctic to the north for most of history the only route for new foods to be

introduced to the continent was through the middle east not only did this mean most foods

introduced first had to be introduced here but also foods originating from this region had the greatest chances of

being introduced to europe which is why this is where we'll find the second

biggest area of origin for popular vegetables starting off strong it's thought that

carrots got their start in afghanistan as this is where the diversity of wild carrots reaches its

peak here carrots started off as white and purple

which as we can see from beets and turnips tends to be the most common colors for tap roots

and it stayed like this for some time as just like with other root veggies carrots were first cultivated for their

leaves and seeds but eventually in what was then persia but it's now parts of iran and

afghanistan people began cultivating carrots for their edible root pretty soon afterwards people started to

notice a common mutation that would leave the root without anthocyanin the purple pigment resulting in a more

yellowish carrot due to the small amount of beta-carotene stored in the root like this carrots made their way into

europe where farmers continued to breed even more varieties like red and yes eventually

orange carrots creating a wide spectrum of carrot colors to choose from why it was the orange carrot that

eventually ended up as everyone's go-to carrot color isn't really understood i mean sure some people like to tell the

story about how it was farmers from the netherlands who grew orange carrots out of some immense sense

of patriotism but that's really nothing more than some crazy story historians came up with to

explain what was more likely just a bunch of people doing something for no particular reason

for all we know it simply could have been the fact that most other root vegetables are either white or

purple and the stark orange color helped the carrot to differentiate itself from all other veggies okay but enough

about carrots they aren't the only top tier vegetable to come out of this region as it's thought that onions also

originated here since their domestication wild onions have actually gone extinct making it

hard to trace their exact area of origin and the best we can do is to say they came from

central asia an area spanning from iran all the way to the top of india roughly corresponding with the

achaemenid empire it was likely the stability brought about by this empire that allowed

agriculture to not only prosper but actually advance as it was also here that spinach is

believed to have been first domesticated however because the achaemenids earned a number of enemies

amongst their european neighbors persian inventions often had to take another

route into europe for spinach it wasn't until the umayyad conquests that a trade network moving

through north africa all the way to southern spain was established allowing the crop to

spread from here to the rest of europe sometimes however a plant would be valuable enough to the point where

demand caused traders to bring it directly into europe this is what happened with rhubarb

originating somewhere within central asia it was actually the ancient chinese who first began using the plant

except they weren't eating it as a vegetable but rather using rhubarb roots as a medicine specifically as a

laxative it's important to note that back then laxatives were a much bigger part of

medicine as it was seen as a way to purge your entire system over time this practice spread first to

the middle east and eventually to europe where it's a supposed medicinal properties earned it a higher price than

even in demand spices like cinnamon and saffron the earliest known record of rhubarb

being consumed as a food only comes from around the 1800s where people in britain started using rhubarb stems in desserts

and for sweetening wine a similar route must have been taken by the radish while essentially no

archaeological evidence exists for us to use to determine its region of origin the only known forms of wild

radishes can be found growing in south east asia with the earliest historical records of radishes coming from greek

and roman farmers in the 1st century ce this suggests that these veggies must have made the several

thousand mile journey long before anything like the silk road had developed

now something you may have noticed is that so far china has been largely left out of the conversation despite my

efforts to figure out why well i couldn't i mean it's not like there wasn't a large number of

vegetables that originated here there was and even something similar to the diversification of brassica olaricea

happened here where it was brassica rappa that was cultivated into

among other things bok choy komatsuna mizuna choi sum and chinese cabbage beyond this soybeans

can also trace their origins here however with the exception of the soybeans none of these vegetables really

reached far outside of east asia my theory is that because for most of human history china

isolated itself from the rest of the world the unique vegetables bred here were never really spread beyond their

point of origin the same can be said for most vegetables originating in sub-saharan africa like

african nightshade okra jute mallow and cow peas because contact between this part of the world and

europe was pretty limited for most of human history these vegetables never made their way into western cuisine

however if the vegetables are good enough they can overcome isolation which is exactly what happened with a number

of crops originating in the americas just like how the mediterranean was the center of crop

cultivation for europe central america played an analogous role for the new world

making it the third and final major source of common vegetables most popular among them is probably corn

or maize having been domesticated from the wild teosinte plant some 9 000 years ago corn

quickly became a staple crop for many indigenous people while the arrival of europeans may have been detrimental for

the people of the americas as far as corn was concerned this was the best thing that ever could have

happened to it production of corn skyrocketed at this point surpassing both

wheat and rice in terms of total production quantity to become the most farmed grain in the world and the second

most farmed crop overall only beaten out by sugar cane due to corn's

key position within global agriculture a lot of research has gone into the plant's genetics both in order to

manipulate them but also to understand where it came from and by extension to know the best environmental conditions

for it this is how we know that it was specifically the balsas river valley in

southern mexico where corn was first domesticated together with beans and squash

corn formed what was known as the three sisters considered to be the three most important crops by many native americans

all of which having originated in close proximity to one another in central america

squash are technically fruits meaning i already covered them in a previous video and so i'll skip talking about them here

beans however deserve their story being told what we're talking about here is known

as the common bean fasciolis bulgaris and similar to the brassica crops as populations of people spread

across the americas they took their beans with them often breeding their very own unique

variety out of a single species it would be out of this common bean that cultivars like black beans

kidney beans navy beans pinto beans cranberry beans and yes even green beans were bred besides the

three sister crops and all their variants central america also produced the sweet potato while

these may not have been as important to native american peoples as europeans began to explore the

pacific ocean they found many pacific islanders had come to rely on the sweet potato as their staple crop

what this appears to suggest is the people of the pacific must have come into contact with people from the

americas hundreds possibly thousands of years before columbus

last but certainly not least we must leave central america and look a little further south

across what's modern-day peru and bolivia where perhaps the world's best vegetable was first cultivated

the potato first domesticated within the andes by the inca similar to beans as the potatoes

spread outward from here farmers developed it into a number of varieties producing potatoes of

virtually every color shape and size however when the spanish arrived and decided they liked them they

only took a small selection back with them to europe meaning the genetic diversity of what

would eventually become the european potato crop was nowhere near that of the american potato

this low genetic diversity made potatoes particularly vulnerable to disease in europe paving the way for events like

the irish potato famine to occur overall however this did little to dissuade europeans from integrating new

world crops into their diets what never ceases to amaze me when making these geography of

food videos is just how diverse our food really is to the point where something as american as

corn ends up being from mexico something as british as baked beans originated as a native

american dish and even something as chinese as stir fry sources veggies everywhere from the

middle east to europe all the way to the americas ultimately what videos like this reveal

is just how interconnected our world is and always has been and where things come

from isn't nearly as important as what you do with them hey everyone thanks for

watching i hope you enjoyed ever since i started this geography of food series i've gotten comments on

literally every video of mine asking specifically for this one so i hope you're satisfied

of course let me know all the vegetables i missed in the comments and also what else you'd like to see the geography of

now that i've covered all the major food groups lastly i couldn't do this without the support of my patrons so if you'd

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besides that like subscribe and check out this playlist of my geography of videos if you want more

thanks