Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables(worksinprogress.news) |
Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables(worksinprogress.news) |
You are probably aware of napa cabbage, but there's also Taiwan Cabbage (goes by other names of course...) https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/taiwan-cabbage
It looks a lot like a flatter "green/european" cabbage. It's leaves and stems are finer and softer than a European cabbage, while still being pretty crunchy (as opposed to napa). Compared to European cabbage, you could actually just stir fry these.
Gai lan is just one variety of "Chinese broccoli" - there are multiple varieties with different stem thicknesses, and "branching ratios". This will let you pick to suit your preferred level of crunch and leaf area to coat with sauce =)
And finally, all of the bok choys are also part of this family.
If you look, you can straight up find the half way points between subfamilies https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/080bca1a659bf2f8b12bca1494c67...
You might be familiar with turnips, bok choy, napa cabbage, and mizuna, but within Asia, there are a dizzying array of vegetables barely documented that are all derivatives of this weedy mustard.
Vegetables like Jima Turnip of the Tibetan plateau, Taicai, Wutacai, etc are hardly documented in English at all
I only wish that as a PSA, they had included the reminder to people over 30 years old who hate Brussels sprouts, that the delicious ones you can eat today are not the ones they hated in their youth, and if you haven't had sprouts in years you might want to give them a second try (salted, oiled and baked, not boiled or steamed of course!)
I was so surprised when I tried baked sprouts for the first time (use a really host cast iron skilet for even better results) that I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!
- Belgian Stoemp: basically smashed-potatoes with smashed-other legumes. Cook everything together (with herbs if you can), smash, add lipid and salt and you’re done!
- German Ein Topf: put vegetables, beans and sausages in a pot (I use tofu ones or tempeh). Cover, cook slowly. It’s almost a salty Tajin from the north.
- Recover bland vegetables (sprouts or anything) to a fantastic soup in 5 minutes: add a bit of water, coconut cream (or caw cream / silken tofu…), spices. A bit of tahin and corail lentils if you have. Mix and adjust water.
Bon appétit :)
Baking is good, but I also came to another conclusion - vegetables that are disgusting if they are cooked to a slimy paste, can be delicious eaten raw in a salad!
I think there's a similar story for, say, canned peas which used to be nasty and made me think I didn't like peas. Granted I still don't consider myself someone who likes peas from a can, but fresh peas in a salad, or flash frozen peas in a bag that stores in the freezer, I'm open to those.
That's not to say that our tastes don't change, but brussel sprouts are kind of a fascinating mirage where it seems like the change might have been growing up into adulthood when really it was a chang in cultivation. These are just off the top of my head, but over the past couple of decades, there's been a quiet revolution in mass produced veggies on a number of levels that in each of their individual instances trace back to fascinating stories of science.
It's actually at the center of a lot of research attention right now for its potential to act as a booster for vegetables that DON'T make traditional mycorrhizal associations
That's like hearing some mammal babies don't consume milk!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Ci...
Citrons, Pomelos, and True Manderins are the progenitor wild species that were hybridized to give us everything from clementines to grapefruit to key limes and more
Just image-search "brassica memes" at your favorite engine.
It is native to Africa and southern Europe I think but is invasive here in the US.
I first found some in my yard a couple of years after I bought a load of "topsoil" from a local materials provider. Not only was the product not a topsoil (it was river channel fine silt that is mostly clay-like particles with zero permeability and zero organic content) but the first thing to sprout on the pile of left-over soil was a tall plant with yellow flowers. There was a single plant that year. I had no idea what it was and asked one of my kids to ID it after it had already dried. Since it wasn't flowering stage when I asked they couldn't get a clear ID so i left it in place. That was a huge mistake. It produced uncounted quantities of small seeds that fell all around it and evidently birds loved it.
The second year saw it sprout up in a 10m radius around the original plant with isolated outliers. Again, I did not know what it was so I let it grow until summer (it is a late winter/early spring plant, one of the first to sprout) by which time it was obvious that this thing was gonna take over if I didn't do something. I sent a few more photos to my kid and this time I got the bad news - bastard cabbage.
With that info in hand I began implementing my eradication plan. I watered in all the plants that I could locate. It was summer and the ground is very dry and soil is hard here at home. With the soil nice and wet I pulled or dug every one of those bastards that I could find knowing that I would be doing the same thing again next year.
So far it has been several years of walking the property, pulling these bastard cabbages as I find them. So far this year I have less than a dozen plants but the season is young. I have found about half of those plants growing where previously I had never seen any and the others were growing in the original affected area.
Just like my years-long battle against St Augustine grass, stickers, goatheads, and Johnson grass I will win. I have eradicated those plants from my property though it took more than a decade to completely eliminate the Johnson grass.
Once I can identify the plant at each growth stage its days are numbered, sometimes with three or four digits, but I will win in the end.
I suppose that means natural selection tends to have more of a pronounced effect when there has been a severe environmental change that wipes out a large fraction of the population and leaves behind only those with adaptive mutations. Otherwise, the adaptive mutation stays in the population but doesn't proliferate excessively. Selective breeding can then be interpreted as an extreme version of environmental stress.
I had previously imagined that evolution was a slow process but it seems that its more of a punctuated equilibrium, where when changes occur they occur quickly.
(Caveat: not a biologist, just a layperson speculating and learning.)
And the stability of the traits is mostly due to careful management. Most of these vegetables will very easily hybridize
In the Andes there are still traditional farmers that maintain over 300 varieties of potatoes. Each one has a name and a history. Some are only ornamental, some are only eaten in soups, some are medicinal, some are a bright purple, some are extremely long, some look like giant pinecones. Just look at the incredible images in this article
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/29/how-peru...
here.
It makes sense to avoid stuff high in oxalic acid if you're at risk of kidney stones but it seems silly to worry about something we've been consuming for longer than we've been a species for
Though I’m struggling to think of a dish I actually enjoy from that plant group.
Meanwhile, back on topic, there is produce all across the globe, not all of it surrounded by brassica oleracia.
After doing some Google searches I realized the plants were related and eventually it sort of made sense. Peppers are almost like a very dry, very firm tomato.
In hindsight it's obvious but at the time it was very surprising.
but for some reason my fealty to potato does not extend to tomatoes and eggplant quite the same way. i feel toward potatoes sort of how gary Larson feels about cows
Now the true surprise with broccoli for me was learning that you can dice the stems and butter-roast them, then use them in pretty much anything from rice dishes to pies. Amazing
It seems to be a law of HN that any discussion of genetics descends into a debate about the existence of übermensch and untermensch. :(
Punctuated equilibrium theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Stephen Jay Gould, who also wrote The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of biological determinism.
> biological determinism
That term itself is a strawman - the argument is not that biology and genes fully determine behavior and life outcomes, merely that they affect it. As an aside, not only was Mismeasure of Man debunked (the skull measurements were not biased [1,2]), attacking craniometry in the era of genetics is like attacking alchemy. He should spend his time attacking PCA plots of the human genetic distribution [3]. Of course he does not, because he would prefer people remained ignorant of that.
It's sad that 166 years after On the Origin of Species, we still haven't accepted that we are not immune to natural selection.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Reassess...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...
That's certainly one hypothesis, but here's an alternative one that I'd like you to consider: he's not doing that because he died in 2002. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould)
> Man alone is the great exception, unaffected by geographical separation and restricted gene flows
Extant bears have never invented the wheel, wolves spend more time eating horses than domesticating them, and despite what you might see on certain corners of the internet there has never been a vulpine Columbus. (To clarify, humans move around a whole lot more than most animals)
Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza measured genetic differences between human populations using the fixation index in 1994 [1]. He was not ignorant of genetics, he just chose to shift attention to craniometry instead. And even now that we have far better tools and knowledge, people choose to focus on outdated arguments instead, because they give the answers they want. E.g. by bringing up Gould when his work is no longer relevant.
> To clarify, humans move around a whole lot more than most animals
By what mechanism do you think the visible physiological distinctions between human populations arose? Clearly humans don't (or haven't up to very recently) moved around enough to even them out.
You think those are the only traits that haven't been evened out?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Genetic_distanc...
Genetic drift, mostly, with some founder effect mixed in.
