A Curious History of Vegetables

Author: Wolf D. Storl
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623170400
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
Featuring gardening tips, recipes, and beautiful full-color pencil drawings of each vegetable, this book for farm-to-fork aficionados and gardeners with an esoteric bent explores the secret history of 48 well known and rare vegetables, examining their symbolism, astrological connections, healing properties, and overall character. A fascinating introduction to vegetable gardening and cooking, A Curious History of Vegetables sets horticulture in its historical, cultural, and cosmological contexts. The author offers his deep understanding of the theory of biodynamic gardening and useful tips on light and warmth, ground covers, composts, crop rotation and weeds. Woven in with folk tales and stories from history, each entry also includes delicious historical recipes for each vegetable.

Spade, Skirret and Parsnip

Author: Bill Laws
Publisher: Sutton Pub Limited
ISBN: 9780750932592
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
History of gardening

How Carrots Won the Trojan War

Author: Rebecca Rupp
Publisher: Storey Publishing
ISBN: 1603429689
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Looks at the history of vegetables and vegetable gardening.

Terrors of the Table

Author: Walter Gratzer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191578622
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Terrors of the Table is an absorbing account of the struggle to find the necessary ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have always waylaid the unwary and the foolish when it comes to the matter of food and health. Walter Gratzer tells the tale of nutrition's heroes, heroines and charlatans with characteristic crispness and verve. We find an array of colourful personalities, from the distinguished but quarrelsome Liebig, to the enterprising Lydia Pinkham. But we also find the slow recognition that the lack of vital ingredients can cause terrible illnesses - scurvy, rickets, beriberi. These diseases stalked the poor in the West even into the 20th century, and scandalously remain in poorer parts of the world today. The narrative stretches from classical times to the modern day and gives a valuable historical perspective to our current understanding. It also highlights some of the problems faced by the developed world regarding health today - in particular diabetes and obesity. And despite our far greater understanding of what our body needs, there are still many who would fall for fads and fancy diets - some dangerous, others just daft. Of course, the story of nutrition does not end there. We have discovered the key vitamins and minerals our body needs, but research continues on the connections between diet, health and disease. The body's biochemistry is complex, and there are no easy answers, no magic formula, that applies to all individuals. The safest and most rational course would seem to be a sensible, moderate, and varied diet, not forgetting that 'a little of what you fancy does you good'.

Pumpkin

Author: Cindy Ott
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804440
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
Why do so many Americans drive for miles each autumn to buy a vegetable that they are unlikely to eat? While most people around the world eat pumpkin throughout the year, North Americans reserve it for holiday pies and other desserts that celebrate the harvest season and the rural past. They decorate their houses with pumpkins every autumn and welcome Halloween trick-or-treaters with elaborately carved jack-o'-lanterns. Towns hold annual pumpkin festivals featuring giant pumpkins and carving contests, even though few have any historic ties to the crop. In this fascinating cultural and natural history, Cindy Ott tells the story of the pumpkin. Beginning with the myth of the first Thanksgiving, she shows how Americans have used the pumpkin to fulfull their desire to maintain connections to nature and to the family farm of lore, and, ironically, how small farms and rural communities have been revitalized in the process. And while the pumpkin has inspired American myths and traditions, the pumpkin itself has changed because of the ways people have perceived, valued, and used it. Pumpkin is a smart and lively study of the deep meanings hidden in common things and their power to make profound changes in the world around us.

Spade, Skirret and Parsnip

Author: Bill Laws
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781437967005
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Vegetables may be associated with dull monotony, but, as Bill Laws reveals in this entertaining book, the humble vegetable has had a far from mundane history. There are garlic inscriptions on Egyptian pyramids; peas, leeks, lettuces and beans are among the oldest vegetables in the world; while maize was cultivated in Mexico 2,500 years ago. Potatoes were venerated by the ancient Peruvians yet caused division between Catholics and Protestants in the mid-1700s. From guinea gardens to genetic modification, from aphrodisiacs to allotments, from poets to pop stars, and from tales of the market trade to the wicked secrets of the vegetable shows, Laws unearths the curious, intriguing and entertaining story of the vegetable. Illustrations.

The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat

Author: Joel S. Denker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442248866
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
How many otherwise well-educated readers know that the familiar orange carrot was once a novelty? It is a little more than 400 years old. Domesticated in Afghanistan in 900 AD, the purple carrot, in fact, was the dominant variety until Dutch gardeners bred the young upstart in the seventeenth century. After surveying paintings from this era in the Louvre and other museums, Dutch agronomist Otto Banga discovered this stunning transformation. The story of the carrot is just one of the hidden tales this book recounts. Through portraits of a wide range of foods we eat and love, from artichokes to strawberries, The Carrot Purple traces the path of foods from obscurity to familiarity. Joel Denker explores how these edible plants were, in diverse settings, invested with new meaning. They acquired not only culinary significance but also ceremonial, medicinal, and economic importance. Foods were variously savored, revered, and reviled. This entertaining history will enhance the reader’s appreciation of a wide array of foods we take for granted. From the carrot to the cabbage, from cinnamon to coffee, from the peanut to the pistachio, the plants, beans, nuts, and spices we eat have little-known stories that are unearthed and served here with relish.

Hybrid

Author: Noel Kingsbury
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226437132
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Book Description
"Noel Kingsbury reveals that even those imaginary perfect foods are themselves far from anything that could properly be called natural, rather, they represent the end of a millennia-long history of selective breeding and hybridization. Starting his story at the birth of agriculture, Kingsbury traces the history of human attempts to make plants more reliable, productive, and nutritiousa story that owes as much to accident and error as to innovation and experiment. Drawing on historical and scientific accounts, as well as a rich trove of anecdotes, Kingsbury shows how scientists, amateur breeders, and countless anonymous farmers and gardeners slowly caused the evolutionary pressures of nature to be supplanted by those of human needs and thus led us from sparse wild grasses to succulent corn cobs, and from mealy, white wild carrots to the juicy vegetables we enjoy today. At the same time, Kingsbury reminds us that contemporary controversies over the Green Revolution and genetically modified crops are not new, plant breeding has always had a political dimension."--Publisher's description.

Fruit

Author: Peter Blackburne-Maze
Publisher: Firefly Books
ISBN: 1552977803
Category : Botanical illustration
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
History of fruit accompanied by 300 color illustrations, and biographies of their illustrators.

The Curious History of Vegetables

Author: BILL. LAWS
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781803997155
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The 'couch potato' is an idler, the 'cabbage-head' a dunce, Swede-bashers are stupid and you may as well give up life if you become a vegetable. A vegetable existence may imply dull monotony, but the human vegetable has sparked protests, threatened to topple a British government and almost triggered a revolution. From the Scottish Presbyterian campaign against the 'sinful potato' to the class act that turned the carrot into a propaganda tool, from garlic inscriptions on Egyptian pyramids to Neolithic broad beans and medieval cabbage, and from the Dig for Victory campaign to their use in perfumes, Spade, Skirret and Parnsip shows vegetables in a fascinating new light.