What's The Most "Vegetable" Vegetable?
3/10/202651 min
Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable, so what exactly is sitting on your dinner plate? And if our culinary world is built on biological lies, which plant is actually the most vegetable like?
Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens tackle a chaotic intersection of linguistics, plant taxonomy, and nutrition, dismantling the arbitrary categories we use to organise our food, revealing that our supermarket aisles are a scientifically lawless wasteland. It is a strangely profound look at how human language struggles to categorise the natural world, proving that the things we eat every...
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First 90 secondsMichael Stevens· Host0:00
Hello and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.
Hannah Fry· Host0:02
And I'm Hannah Fry.
Michael Stevens· Host0:04
And today we're gonna talk about vegetables. In fact, uh, what I want you out there, the listener, to do is if you can, if you can, comment below what you believe is the most vegetable vegetable.
Hannah Fry· Host0:20
And we're not necessarily talking here about the first vegetable that comes to mind. We want you to go deep on this. We want you to, we want you to get to the soul of what it means to be a vegetable. What vegetable best personifies, best resembles that wider class?
Michael Stevens· Host0:38
That's right. That's right. Uh, uh, pretend you're on Family Feud and you're asked, uh, to name a vegetable, and you get the most points if the most other people named the same one. All right?
Hannah Fry· Host0:49
Mm-hmm.
Michael Stevens· Host0:49
We're talking the most famous, prototypical, obvious vegetable. As it turns out, the answer is both more difficult and more revealing than you might think. [Instrumental music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
Hannah Fry· Host1:08
The word cancer comes from the Greek karkinos, meaning crab, and Hippocrates used that word because tumors can spread out like crab's legs.
Michael Stevens· Host1:17
For a long time, cancer was poorly understood, and so I think because of that, it was almost scarier and, and people didn't even say its name. But what science has done since is replace uncertainty with understanding.