Vegetables

Plant food has always been vital to our diet, and early humans ate a primarily vegetarian diet. Their principal foods were wild fruits, seeds, leaves, stalks, tubers, and roots, supplemented by the meat of hunted or scavenged animals. Many anthropologists agree that the gradual change from a nomadic to a domestic lifestyle with the inception of agriculture about 10,000 years ago considerably reduced the diversity of our plant food, but facilitated the creation of a reliable supply. To achieve the greatest nutritional benefit and best taste from this new resource, our ancestors developed methods to make produce more palatable and digestible, the foundation of today’s diverse vegetable cookery with its cultural and regional variations.