Delicious Pieces: The Vegetables We Eat
Delicious Pieces: The Vegetables We Eat
Text and photographs by Larry Hufford
Marion Ownbey Herbarium
Washington State University
Introduction
We consume many parts of plants commonly in our diet of vegetables and fruits. Most of these plants are so-called "seed plants." These are plants that make seeds in the course of forming offspring. Relatively few kinds of plants today, such as mosses, liverworts, horsetails, and ferns, do not make seeds as a part of their life cycle. Seed plants are, thus, the most common kinds of plants on Earth today. They are the plants we encounter most frequently not only in the landscape, but also in the grocery store.
In this program, we will use grocery store vegetables to examine how seed plants are constructed. The study of body forms is called morphology, a term coined by the German poet Goethe. As we will see in this program, seed plants can have diverse body forms, and we want to use familiar grocery store plants to learn the basic elements of their morphology.
Even among the relatively few domesticated plants we use for food, we find a wide range of forms. Some of these forms have been accentuated through the domestication process in which people selected among individual plants over many generations to produce the features they sought in their crops. It is these highly accentuated parts that compose many delicious pieces of our diet.
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