Nothing like spring sunshine and rains to get those gardens growing. Whether you live and work on a farm or just put a few potted plants up on the window sill, there’s something about tending earth and watching the (sometimes literal) fruits of your labor grow up out of it that stirs the human soul. It’s just more fulfilling to gather raspberries from your own backyard bush than to scoop up a sterile, plastic box full of them at the supermarket for $5.99. It connects you to nature, fills you with the satisfaction of (once again, literally) reaping what you sow. Of course, at the supermarket, you don’t have to worry about critters getting to the goods first. Still, it’s no wonder that gardening is such a popular pastime and that more and more people are choosing to buy farmland and raise crops for a living.
But what kinds of crops might you grow, if you are so inclined? We live in a global economy, which means that virtually any kind of food that has ever been eaten is available at your nearby grocery store, from lychee fruit to bison burgers (though we won’t typically find many insects for sale, despite their nutritional value and long history as part of the human diet). Where to start? As more than 86 percent of our readers are from the Western Hemisphere, you might consider only growing fruits and vegetables originally native to the Americas. So what gets left out of our garden plot?
The Middle East, or the area from Egypt to Mesopotamia (Greek, meso: middle; potamos: rivers; “between two rivers”), as it was called, is known as the “Fertile Crescent,” on account of all the good farmland there. This is, of course, the birthplace of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and home to the mythical Garden of Eden (either Hebrew edhen: “pleasure, delight” or Sumerian edin: “place that is well-watered throughout”). In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Eden is the place where the first two humans were created. They lived in want of nothing until they disobeyed God and got kicked out, dooming their species to have to work for their supper (and snakes are bad, for some reason). In Sumerian myth, the place was called Edin, and it was where the Annunaki (“people who came from heaven to earth”), a race of god-lings, lived and eventually learned to do things like bathe and grow food. Oh, and also create mankind.
Middle Eastern vegetables include lettuce, radishes, onions, carrots, and cucumbers. We also get wheat, barley, oats, peas, mustard, almonds, sheep, pigs, cattle, and goats from the area. Quite a prolific region for foodstuffs! From Northern Europe, we get pears, raspberries, radishes, spinach, horses, and rye. From the Mediterranean (“middle earth”) come beets, broccoli, cabbage, kale, olives, and Brussels sprouts (the form we know now probably did originate in Belgium, but an earlier type of the plant came from ancient Rome).
Well, that limits our garden quite a bit. How about Asia? “Asia” comes from Akkadian asu: “to rise,” in reference to the sun coming up from the east. Incidentally, the Chinese call their country Zhongguo, which means “central land.” So, you know, everybody thinks they’re from the epicenter of the planet. “Japan” comes from Marco Polo’s “Chipangu,” which is from a Chinese transliteration of the Japanese Nippon (ni means “sun”; pon means “source”).
As to origin myths, one of the more popular ones in China holds that the land is made up of the dead body of the first man, Pangu (“ancient plate”?). While alive, he separated the Earth and sky (Yin and Yang), and when he died, his body filled the gap with rivers, mountains, and plants. What parts of him made our veggies, you ask? Why, his body hair, of course! Also of note: his sweat and snot made up the rain.
With that appetizing information at hand, let’s see what foods originated in Asia and the remaining continents. We get eggplant, rice (of course), coconut, kiwi, peaches, pretty much all the citrus fruits (Florida oranges and Georgia peaches, you say? Got ’em here first!), rhubarb, as well as chicken, lychee, mangoes, and black pepper. The list of African produce is slimmer, featuring yams and watermelon. From Australia, on the other hand, we get an array of old standbys, like conkerberries, doubah, emu apples or muntries, and the zig zag vine.
So what do we have left from the Americas that we can plant in our garden? Well, there’s corn. Originally called “maize,” the Europeans took to calling it “Indian corn,” the word “corn” deriving from an Old Saxon word for grain, but “Indian” was dropped later on. Maize was so important in the Americas that the Mayans believed they were made from it by the gods.
Well, first, the gods tried to make people out of mud. But those people didn’t do anything! They were just mud! Then, they made people out of trees — or wood, anyway. These people moved around and stuff, but they didn’t worship the gods. They lacked faith, and the gods found it disturbing. So the gods decided to animate all the wood peoples’ household appliances, which turned on them and attacked (just like the second Transformers movie
Other than corn, which constitutes, like, 90 percent of all processed food in the United States (via corn syrup, corn starch, corn-fed beef, etc.), there are quite a few options for our garden. From the Americas, we get beans, peanuts, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. (Haitian Creole batata is the word for “sweet potato”; originally, white potatoes were called “bastard potatoes” by the Europeans because they were cheap and of minor importance compared to their sweet cousins until Ireland built its economy around them.) More native American foods include tomatoes, chili peppers, avocados, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, pineapples, and squashes. We also get quinoa, sunflowers, turkey, bison, walnuts, pecans, chocolate, vanilla, and maple syrup.
Well, looking at the origins of all these foods, I can safely say I’m glad all this stuff is available at the grocery store. I suppose I could live with food just from the Americas (chocolate and vanilla? Score!), but goodness knows our garden out back is all the better for having a few raspberries to pick each year.