50 Fun Facts About Vegetables

Which vegetable did President George H. W. Bush refuse to eat in 1990, saying he had hated it since childhood?

Broccoli growers answered the president by sending 10 tons of it to the White House in trucks. The delivery never reached the menu and was donated to a Washington food bank.

The original Halloween jack-o'-lanterns of Ireland and Scotland were carved from which root vegetable?

Turnip lanterns carved with grotesque faces lit Halloween across Ireland and Britain in the 19th century. Immigrants took the custom to the United States, where a far larger native gourd took over.

A thousand years ago, long before the orange variety took over, cultivated carrots were typically which colour?

Purple roots were the norm in the 10th century, coloured by anthocyanin pigments. Orange carrots did not become the standard until centuries later, helped along by growers in the Netherlands.

Which major US city takes its name from a Miami-Illinois word for a wild relative of the onion?

Chicago is a French rendering of šikaakwa, the name of a pungent wild plant that grew profusely in the area. The explorer La Salle recorded the site as 'Checagou' around 1679.

Mark Twain joked that which vegetable is 'nothing but cabbage with a college education'?

Cauliflower gets the line in Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, as one of the mock proverbs that open each chapter. The same entry claims the peach was once a bitter almond.

Which spring vegetable, as the novelist Marcel Proust noted, gives urine a distinctive smell soon after eating?

Asparagus contains asparagusic acid, which digestion breaks down into pungent sulfur compounds. The effect can be detected as little as 15 minutes after a meal.

In 1937, growers in Crystal City, Texas, put up a statue of which cartoon character for boosting their crop?

Popeye earned the statue in 1937 because growers credited the spinach-eating sailor with making their cash crop more popular. Alma, Arkansas, disputes the town's claim to the 'capital' title.

Outside Japan, the green paste sold as wasabi is widely made from which other pungent root vegetable?

Horseradish stands in because true wasabi is hard to farm on a large scale, which keeps it scarce and expensive. The usual substitute blends it with mustard, starch and green colouring.

In Hans Christian Andersen's tale, a princess proves her royal blood by feeling which vegetable under her bedding?

A pea is hidden beneath twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds to test the stranger's claim. The story ends with it on display in a museum, 'where it might still remain'.

In 1948 a California growers' association gave a young Marilyn Monroe a sash naming her queen of which vegetable?

Artichoke Queen was the title on the sash, presented at a Kiwanis Club meeting during a week-long publicity visit. Nearby Castroville calls itself the Artichoke Center of the World.

The Caesar salad was created in 1924 by Italian-born restaurateur Caesar Cardini in which Mexican border city?

Tijuana drew American diners dodging Prohibition, which is why Cardini ran a restaurant there. The salad is said to have been improvised when the kitchen was overwhelmed and short on ingredients.

Louisiana gumbo can be thickened with roux, filé powder or the gooey pods of which vegetable?

Okra pods release a slippery mucilage as they cook, which gives the stew its body. The dish may well be named after it: in the Kimbundu language the plant is called ki ngombo.

Which vegetable do people in Wales traditionally wear on St David's Day, as an alternative to the daffodil?

Leeks became a Welsh emblem because, by tradition, Welsh troops wore them in battle to tell their own side from the enemy. The plant is also regarded as Saint David's personal symbol.

Which vegetable gives borscht, the Ukrainian soup often served with sour cream, its distinctive red colour?

Beetroot colours the best-known Ukrainian version, but the soup began as a sour brew of pickled hogweed, the wild meadow plant that gave the dish its Slavic name.

In Cajun and Creole cooking, the 'holy trinity' is onions, bell peppers and which third vegetable?

Celery survived from the French mirepoix that Louisiana cooks adapted. They swapped the carrots of the original for bell peppers, partly for reasons of availability and cost.

Baba ghanoush, the smoky Levantine dip served with pita bread, is made by roasting and mashing which vegetable?

Eggplant is charred whole over an open flame before peeling, which leaves the pulp soft and smoky. The dish's Arabic name is sometimes translated as 'pampered daddy'.

The sauce aioli takes its name from the Provençal and Catalan words for oil and which other ingredient?

Garlic and olive oil worked into an emulsion are the whole of the classic recipe. Versions that add egg yolk and lemon juice are closer to a flavoured mayonnaise.

Pepitas, roasted as a snack and common in Mexican cooking, are the green hulled seeds of which vegetable?

Pumpkin seeds have a white outer husk and are light green once it is removed. They are typically roasted, then salted and sometimes spiced.

In the animated series VeggieTales, Bob the Tomato shares hosting duties with Larry, who is which vegetable?

A cucumber and a tomato lead a cast of talking produce that lives on a kitchen countertop, retelling Bible stories and parodying pop culture.

Which US state, home to the Snake River Plain, puts the slogan 'Famous Potatoes' on its licence plates?

Idaho owes its potato fame to that belt of low-lying land across the south of the state, which grows almost a third of the nation's crop.

The Greek town of Marathon, which gave the long-distance race its name, is itself named after which vegetable?

Fennel is 'marathon' in Greek, so the site of the famous ancient battle literally means a plain with fennel.

Each 23 December, the Mexican city of Oaxaca holds a contest for scenes carved from which oversized vegetable?

Radishes were first carved by local farmers to catch shoppers' eyes at the Christmas market, and the city made it a formal competition in 1897. The carvings wilt within hours of being cut.

Tapioca, the starch rolled into the chewy pearls of bubble tea, is extracted from which tropical root vegetable?

Cassava starch is pressed through a sieve while still moist to form the pearls, known as boba in East Asia. The word tapioca itself comes from the Tupi language of Brazil.

In the Native American 'Three Sisters' method, maize and climbing beans grow alongside which third crop?

Squash sprawls between the mounds, where its wide leaves shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and the weeds down. The cornstalks, meanwhile, act as a trellis for the beans.

Which leafy Chinese cabbage has a Cantonese name that literally means 'white vegetable'?

Bok choy is the Cantonese baak choi, written with two characters meaning 'white vegetable'. Mandarin speakers prefer to use the very same characters for napa cabbage.

Which leafy green, known in Italy as cavolo nero, is a traditional ingredient of the Tuscan soup ribollita?

Kale of this dark Tuscan type is also sold as dinosaur kale, because its bumpy leaves are thought to resemble dinosaur skin. Ribollita, the soup's name, means 'reboiled'.

Which salad leaf is sold as 'rocket' in Britain, a name that traces back to the Latin word for caterpillar?

Arugula reached American English from an Italian dialect. Its first known appearance in print there was a 1960 New York Times article by the food editor Craig Claiborne.

Which scale, devised by an American pharmacist in 1912, rates the heat of chilli peppers?

The Scoville scale began as a taste test: pepper extract was diluted in sugar water until most of a panel of five trained tasters could no longer detect any heat.

An enzyme in the small intestine converts the beta-carotene in carrots into which essential nutrient?

Vitamin A from carrots will not help you see in the dark unless you are deficient in it. Eat huge amounts for a long time, though, and your skin can turn a harmless yellow-orange.

Coleslaw takes its name from 'koolsla', a word meaning cabbage salad in which language?

Dutch 'kool' sounds like 'cole', which is how the dish got its English name in the 18th century. The 'cole' half traces back to the Latin caulis, meaning a stalk or cabbage.

Which bright red pigment, also found in watermelons and grapefruits, gives ripe tomatoes their colour?

Lycopene takes its name from Lycopersicon, the old scientific name for the tomato genus. Its deep red comes from a chain of eleven conjugated double bonds.

Although cooked and eaten as a vegetable, the tomato is botanically which specific type of fruit?

A berry, to a botanist, is a fruit made of a flower's ovary together with its seeds. Cooks prize the tomato instead for its strong savoury, umami flavour.

The Italian word for tomato, pomodoro, comes from a name coined in the 16th century that literally means what?

Golden apple, or pomi d'oro, was the name the botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli put into print, ten years after his 1544 herbal gave the plant its earliest mention in European literature.

Lettuce, which the Romans called lactuca, belongs to the same botanical family as which flower?

The daisy family, also known as the sunflower or aster family, counts lettuce as a member. What looks like a single daisy flower is really a head made up of many much smaller ones.

Beans, lentils and other legumes host root bacteria that enrich the soil by fixing which element from the air?

Nitrogen is turned into ammonia by Rhizobia bacteria living in nodules on the roots. Some of it is left for later crops, which is why legumes play a key role in crop rotation.

Onions, chives and shallots all belong to which plant genus, first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753?

Allium is among the largest plant genera in the world, with hundreds of species. Many are edible and have been cultivated for a very long time.

Growing lettuce, tomatoes and other crops in nutrient-rich water instead of soil is known as what?

Hydroponics was promoted as a way to raise farm crops from 1929 by William Gericke of the University of California. Francis Bacon had written about growing plants without soil three centuries earlier.

Which B-group nutrient, first isolated from spinach in 1941, takes its name from the Latin word for leaf?

Folate echoes the Latin 'folium' because it was found in dark-green leafy vegetables. Legumes are rich in it too: lentils and chickpeas both beat spinach weight for weight.

Potatoes that turn green after exposure to light also build up which bitter natural toxin?

Solanine is the plant's own pesticide, and it is most concentrated in the peel. The green colour itself is chlorophyll, which builds up in response to the same light.

Which word do farmers and nutritionists use for the dried edible seeds of legumes such as lentils and chickpeas?

Pulses, as the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization uses the term, are legume crops harvested solely for the dry seed. That leaves out legumes picked as fresh vegetables and oil crops such as soybeans.

In Beatrix Potter's 1902 tale, Peter Rabbit sneaks into whose vegetable garden against his mother's orders?

Mr. McGregor's garden was off limits because Peter's father had been caught there and put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor. Peter gets away, but loses his blue jacket and shoes.

Bugs Bunny's habit of chewing carrots while talking fast is thought to echo a scene in which Clark Gable film?

It Happened One Night has Gable eating carrots while talking quickly with his mouth full, six years before the rabbit's debut. The cartoon in turn is widely credited with the idea that rabbits love carrots.

A much-visited statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota, depicts the mascot of which vegetable brand?

Green Giant's mascot got his leafy suit, his smile and the word 'Jolly' from the adman Leo Burnett in 1935. His booming 'Ho, ho, ho' followed in 1961.

Frozen vegetables owe their start to which American inventor, who watched Inuit in Labrador freeze fresh fish?

Clarence Birdseye saw that food frozen rapidly in Arctic conditions kept its texture and flavour better than food frozen slowly. He founded a company selling quick-frozen fish in 1924.

Which European capital has an orchestra, founded in 1998, that plays instruments made from fresh vegetables?

Vienna's Vegetable Orchestra makes its instruments from raw produce before each performance. The leftovers and off-cuts are cooked into a soup that is served to the audience afterwards.

Lima beans, shipped abroad in Spanish colonial times, take their name from the capital city of which country?

Peru's capital gave the beans their English name after they were shipped abroad in Spanish colonial times. The country's ancient Moche culture grew the beans heavily and often depicted them in its art.

Which French culinary term describes cutting vegetables into long, thin strips that resemble matchsticks?

Julienne strips are only a few millimetres across. Turn a pile of them through 90 degrees and dice finely, and the result is a brunoise.

Ratatouille, the Provençal stew of summer vegetables, is particularly associated with which French city?

Nice gives the dish its fuller name, ratatouille niçoise. The word ratatouille itself is related to a French verb meaning 'to stir' or 'to toss'.

Which tomato, sold from 1994, was the first genetically engineered food licensed for human consumption?

Flavr Savr carried a reversed gene that held back an enzyme involved in rotting. Mounting costs kept its maker from turning a profit, and production ceased in 1997.

France banned potato growing in 1748 partly because the crop was thought to cause which disease?

Leprosy fears kept the ban on the books until 1772, when potatoes were declared safe to eat, largely thanks to the army pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who had lived on them as a prisoner of war in Prussia.