Description

The term applied to the many varieties of garden plants used for food. Vegetables along with rice have long served as a staple of the human diet.

The most important improvements in a number of vegetable varieties are actually quite recent and are largely attributable to the discovery of the principles of genetic trails as elaborated by Darwin and Mendel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These discoveries have made it possible to produce new varieties with specific crop yields and qualities such as flavor, color and so on. Today vegetables are consumed mainly as an accompaniment to main courses in most of the Western Hemisphere.

The consumption of vegetables has been on the rise since the mid 1970's. Scientific research has establishing a close link between a high consumption of fruits and vegetables and the prevention of certain diseases, have contributed to making the health benefits of vegetables more widely known.

A simple way to classify vegetables is on the basis of the portion of the plant that is used for food. This gives us:

bulb vegetables-such as garlic, scallion, chive, shallot, onion, and leek;
leaf vegetables- chicory, cabbage, watercress, spinach, various types of lettuce, nettle, sorrel, dandelion and radicchio
inflorescent vegetables- artichoke, broccoli, cauliflower and broccoli rape.
fruit vegetables- egg plant, avocado, chayote, cucumber, squash, okra, olive and peppers;
root vegetables- beets, burdock, carrots, eleriac, malanga, turnip, parsnip, radish, rutabaga and salsify;
stalk vegetables- asparagus, bamboo, chard, cardoon, celery, kohlrabi, feddlehead fern and fennel;
tuber vegetables- crosne, yam, jicama, manioc, sweet potato and taro.