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.
Speaking of Asian vegetables, Brassica oleracea tends to get all the love because Europeans are more familiar with cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, etc but Brassica rapa is perhaps even more diverse.
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 already knew about this phylogenetic tree (although I have always heard the common ancestor be called the "wild mustard", not wild cabbage), but the article was quite interesting.
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 think the sprouts trauma is the result of picking the wrong cooking method.
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!
There’s many delicious and easy ways to eat vegetable! Two of my favorite:
- 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.
"I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!"
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!
Raw broccoli in a salad will get you tossed out of the country I was born in :-)
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
Great point about brussel sprouts and it's truly fascinating on a number of levels. I think we're all tempted to believe the story that our palate just changes as we get older. But that's not what happened with brussel sprouts! They became cultivated differently to change their taste and so the modern ones we have are not the bitter ones we had as a kid.
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.
People always say this and no, they still taste nasty. It would be interesting to compare today's sprouts to one of the original examples, they must've been truly foul if there's been such an improvement.
If you liked this, you will be delighted to learn about the “Triangle of U”: the common brassicas are not just tetraploid, they are Frankensteinian mashups of earlier diploid species with different numbers of chromosomes!
Yeah the family is pretty unique for not relying on mycorrhizal fungi but it does still rely on other fungi like Serendipita indica which is a basidiomycete fungus and acts as a facultative endophyte. Meaning it can live on its own in the soil but it can also develop inside plant roots and play many of the same roles mycorrhizal fungi play.
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
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
Not nearly as drastic as the cabbage case, but to me it’s also interesting that there are three ancestral, wild species of citrus fruit – mandarin, pomelo, and citron – and all the popular modern cultivars are hybrids of those three.
For some reason, there was a whole series of brassica oleracea memes going around in 2020 (does that make it a meta-meme? or is that the meme itself, and the images are just instances of the meme?), and they're still wonderful.
Just image-search "brassica memes" at your favorite engine.
This doesn't mention the one brassica that I hate more than any. Bastard cabbage. Like the other brassicas it is edible from flower/fruit to the root. Goes good in salads, etc. Unfortunately it is an invasive species here in Texas that quickly overwhelms native wildflowers. It appears along roads where work has been completed and rights-of-way reseeded using non-native grass mixes.
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.
It's amazing that it only takes centuries. Under natural selection, species traits stay relatively stable for thousands or even millions of years.
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.)
It doesn't "take" centuries, it's just been going on for centuries. You can probably develop a very unique cultivar in a single lifetime. This is quite common in the horticultural industry and is especially feasible with weedy species like Brassicas
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
In fact, punctuated equilibrium is quite compatible with what you describe as "the dogma that we are all the same".
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.
Yet punctuated equilibrium does not apply to cabbage, dog breeds, wolf varieties, and countless others. There are 37 subspecies of wolf, 10 of brown bear (yes, only brown bear. Other bears have their own subspecies each), and 47 red fox subspecies. Man alone is the great exception, unaffected by geographical separation and restricted gene flows.
> 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.
> Of course he does not, because he would prefer people remained ignorant of that.
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?
Years ago I made harissa out of peppers for sauce for baked chicken wings. To my surprise it tasted tomato-ey.
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
Genes of the wild cabbage: "yah man, we will turn this leafy body into whatever you like. That you are going to eat it? We don't mind a bit, as long as you make more copies of us; that's all that matters."
The roots of the young Brachychiton acuminatus can be cooked in ashes and eaten like a sweet potato .. but despite the vast number of rocks in its native habitat .. not a single brassica oleracia will be found by throwing them.
When I read the title, I immediately though, I think this is going to be about Brussel sprouts etc. as I just saw a video [0] that mentions the same lineage. The video is part of the series about the evolution of the flagellum, which is really well made.
Since we've been eating oxalic acid for millions of years I highly doubt it's a problem for us. In fact it acts as an antioxidant, can inhibit the growth of many bacteria/fungi, and can bind to heavy metals like lead and mercury.
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
I have no opinion on whether it is a problem for people in general, but my observations after switching to a low-oxalate diet, then introducing high-oxalate meals as a test are that it is definitely a problem for me.
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...
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