THE BRASSICA BREEDING PROGRAM
Humanity has a knack for selective breeding and toying with the natural order of evolutionary history. It is probably our favorite thing to do as a species, other than ponder and think critically and give the universe a mind with which to see itself and proactively destroy the planet (which all involves selective breeding, but that is not this conversation). You are probably aware that we’ve been working on turning wolves into toy pomeranians and pugs for thousands of years, but did you know that we’ve been turning wild mustard into baby bok choy and brussels sprouts for just as long?
We have been breeding plants to our whims and fancies for as long as we’ve been practicing agriculture, possibly even longer, depending on how strictly you choose to define agriculture. As soon as we figured out that seeds make plants, we were choosing the seeds of the plants that we liked the most and throwing them back where they came from, thus cultivating plants with desirable traits and, technically, birthing agriculture and breeding all at once. I love getting mired in semantics, but will avoid getting too ecology textbook here and strictly defining the differences between breeding, cultivation, and agriculture. The point is, corn looked like normal grass before we bred it, tomatoes were a tiny black fruit before we bred them, bananas were chock full of chewy black seeds before we bred them, and the vast array of brassica varieties (brassicae, plural) available today were all derived from a singular wild mustard plant native to the Eastern Mediterranean.
It is true that the vast majority of the plants we eat (and landscape with for that matter) today have come into being through artificial selection and breeding by human hands, usually over many thousands of years. Selective breeding by generational selection has evolved into cloning, hybridization, and genetically modified plant seed (in the sense of modern genetically engineered seed, as everything we’re talking about here is technically “genetic modification.” Yes, I don’t care how clean you eat, you are eating GMOs every single time you eat anything ever).
But we have pulled so many utterly different-seeming plants out of this one little mustard plant that are capable of existing in so many different climates and providing us with such a cornucopic array of ways to eat our veggies. As such, the brassicae simply cannot be ignored as an icon in humanity’s ongoing problematic fixation with shaping the world around us to our weird-ass desires.
Are you ready for a brief rundown of a selection of what is probably significantly less than half of the brassicae out there in the world? There are subspecies of the family known as cultivars that I could divide all of these types into, but I think it’s more fun and looks less like I’m letting AI write this for me off of a Wikipedia page if I just do it the way I’m about to do it.
KALE
Yes. All of the kale is derived from the same Mediterranean tiny wild cabbage plant. Lacinato kale and Portuguese kale are slightly different from all the other kale in terms of the aforementioned cultivars that exist, but it’s still all kale, and it’s still all of the same family, and it can all grow in freezing weather without a complaint.
COLLARDS AND MUSTARD GREENS
I am lumping these together because they are both Southern staple greens. Never mind all the rest, but contrary to kale’s ability to thrive in cool to cold weather, these greens are beloved in part because of their ability to thrive even in very hot heat. Sure, we’ve made dogs for the Arctic and dogs for the Tropics, but I dare you to find a banana that can thrive in Canada. Brassicae are wild.
CABBAGE
This being the other green in the brassica family most common to Western cuisine, we are talking about all the cabbages here: the fat round guys and the skinny long boys and all the girls in between. How did we get those lumpy balls and weird ovals from the same thing that kale and collards come from?
KOHLRABI
This one is more for the chefs and the garden girlies—it’s very common in the farmer’s market but most people don’t exactly know what to do with it. It is the missing evolutionary link between cabbage and collards, with greens growing atop it and an extremely bulbous stem that is chopped up and eaten much in the manner of cabbage. Read that again—it is the stem that is bulbous and cooked, a very bizarre growth habit on the spectrum of brassica growth habits.
BRUSSELS SPROUTS
I know I didn’t explain that whole bulbous stem thing that well and you may be confused, but maybe my explanation of how strangely brussels sprouts grow will help you to visualize the growing manner of the kohlrabi as well. Brussels sprouts plants grow tall, like two or three feet tall, with an inch-ish thick stem, and then the sprouts grow out of the side of the stalk thereafter. Imagine sleigh bells, or that awesome crazy Aztec spiky club weapon, the macuahuitl. Yeah, humans made that exist from the same plant they made mustard greens from.
BROCCOLI AND CAULIFLOWER
Bred for the head, baby. These are probably the most common brassicae to the Western world, but also kind of objectively the weirdest. We tricked these brassicae into putting out like a hundred times more flowers than we let other brassicae have, and then we bred them to keep their little flower heads tiny and tight and wait an excessively long time to push forth actual flowers and procreate, and then we cut off the flowery bits while they were still compact and before they flowered so we could have some nice chunky florets to enjoy for ourselves. Humans are weird.
“ASIAN GREENS”
Don’t cancel me, bro. This is still the grocery and agricultural term widely used and accepted to describe greens such as pac choi (or pak choi, pok choi, or bok choy, spell it however—it’s almost all correct), gai lan, tatsoi, and many, many more “Asian greens.” It is a broad category that encompasses a wide array of vegetables that are used predominantly in Southeast Asian cuisine but are known far and wide. Suffice it to say that when it comes to climatic adaptability and breadth of human breeding of a singular baseline plant, this again exemplifies just how far we have gone turning one little thing into such an infinite selection of sweet and spicy and crunchy and squishy plantstuffs.
HORSERADISH AND WASABI
These are also brassicae; in this case bred to develop thick roots that are then ground up and juiced and squished to make spicy sauces to clear the sinuses and such.
MUSTARD
It should be obvious, but it’s also obviously not obvious at all because it just feels weird, but mustard the condiment, in all its forms, is derived from ground up mustard seeds mixed with vinegar and such.
Brassica. No matter how you grow it. It’s what’s for dinner.
illustrations by Rachel Speck
