The Case of the Colourful Cauliflower

What do kale, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts all have in common? Did you know that they all originally came from the same plant?

Today, our class of Special Topics for International Development went on a field trip to Garden Party. We learned about the Community Supported Agriculture program that they run, discussed food challenges and opportunities, and even had the chance to help out in one of the gardens. This trip inspired me to write a blog post about food systems in Canada, but there is so much information and ideas about food that trying to condense everything into one post would not let me do justice to the topic. Thus, I will be starting a mini-series on food. For now I will focus mostly on Canada, but we'll see where we go!

We are not eating the same foods that our parents and grandparents ate. Our food has continually been altered to grow bigger and look better. Take a look at how corn has evolved over time:

In the past, changes to our food have occurred slowly through the process of selective breeding. People would grow a crop and select individual plants that had traits that they wanted in future crops to produce the seeds for next year's crop. The wild mustard plant is an example of how selection for different traits can be used to create completely different products over time. Cabbage, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, and broccoli all originally came from the same plant! Someone decided that they wanted to grow plants with larger flower clusters and selected for that trait while another person decided they preferred eating the leaves and selected plants with larger leaves. Pretty neat isn't it?

This process of selective breeding in plants has been used for thousands of years. In fact, the domestication of wild plants to be grown for food was really what allowed people to live a stationary instead of a nomadic lifestyle

One example of selective breeding that I found particularly interesting is the case of the colourful cauliflower. You can now buy cauliflower in a variety of colours including green, orange, and purple. The first coloured cauliflower was a genetic mutant that was dwarf-sized and orange. It was found in Canada in 1970 and was cross-bred with a traditional white cauliflower over the following three decades to create a product that looks exactly like a typical white cauliflower except for its bright orange colour. The beta-carotine that gives the vegetable its orange pigment also increases its nutritional value to give it a vitamin A content that is about 25 times the white version.

Some of you might immediately be thinking about the unnaturalness of colouring our vegetables, but the truth is that this is nothing new. Until the 17th century, most of the carrots eaten by Europeans were either purple, white, or yellow, or even red or black. The Dutch were the ones who created orange carrots, probably by cross-breeding a red and a yellow carrot, in order to celebrate the royal family. (And yes, I am proud to be Dutch despite our disheartening Euro cup appearance). Only recently have purple, white, and yellow carrots been making a comeback in our diets.

Do you know of any interesting foods that has been created through selective breeding? Do you have fundamental problems with eating colourful cauliflower? What about eating colourful carrots? Are there any other food-related topics about which you would like to read?

Happy eating!