Who Invented the Carrot?

The carrot did not exist. Neither did the cabbage, the sweetcorn, the tomato you would recognise, the banana, the almond you can safely eat, or the wheat that can be threshed without the grain scattering into the soil. What existed were wild plants, and most of them were small, bitter, fibrous or actively poisonous. What changed them was ten thousand years of ordinary people choosing which seeds to keep. This book is that story, told carefully. What a wild vegetable is actually like. The four changes that show up in every domesticated crop on every continent, including the broken hinge that made agriculture possible: a mutation that stops a grass scattering its own seed, which is bad for the plant and the foundation of every civilisation since. Then family by family. One wild coastal plant that became cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi, which are as different from each other as breeds of dog and are the same species. The Mexican grass with five grains in a hard case that became maize, a transformation so extreme that botanists refused to believe it. The nightshades and why Europe was right to be suspicious. Roots, onions, pulses, grains, and the fruits we insist on calling vegetables. A chapter on the crops that food histories leave out, from sorghum and teff to the Andean tubers nobody outside the region has seen. And a whole part on the stories that are wrong, including the one in the title. The Dutch did not breed an orange carrot to honour William of Orange. The spinach decimal point is itself doubtful. Confidently repeated food history is mostly folklore, and this book says which claims it will not stand behind. Ending with what is being made now: the banana that is one plant copied a billion times and the disease coming for it, vegetables invented within living memory, how a new variety is actually made, and an honest account of the argument about modern breeding. With an appendix of forty crops and where they came from.

• The four changes that appear in every domesticated crop, everywhere
• Why a mutation that made a grass worse at being a grass is the foundation of civilisation
• How one wild plant became six vegetables you would never connect
• Why the Irish famine was about genetic narrowness as much as about disease
• Which famous food stories are folklore, including the carrot in the title
• Why every banana in the export trade is a clone of the same individual plant

• Anyone who has wondered why supermarket tomatoes taste like that
• Gardeners, cooks and people who like knowing where things came from
• Readers who want the folklore separated from the evidence
• People who have been told that natural food exists
• Anyone who enjoyed being told that broccoli and cabbage are the same plant

1. 01Introduction: Nobody, and that is the interesting part
2. 02Part One: How it was done
3. 03Part Two: The families
4. 04Part Three: The stories that are wrong
5. 05Part Four: The recent past, and what is being made now
6. 06Closing: Your plate is a museum
7. 07Appendix: Forty vegetables and where they came from

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