this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 89 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

How? Like... literally how?

I grow kale and it looks nothing like the plant in the OP. It looks like a regular bunch of kale.

Or is this like "all 6 vegetables come from one main vegetable", kind of like how all citrus fruits comes from citron.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

kind of like how all citrus fruits comes from citron.

This is what happened

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

No, it's cooler than that! All these vegetables are cultivars of the same species (Brassica oleracea). Citrus trees are different species with common origins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Artificial selection!

If you think that’s amazing - look up what bananas looked like before human cultivation. Basically any fruit or vegetable you eat is the product of centuries of humans carefully selecting what seeds to save and plant.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Just like dog breeds look very distinct, but cranked up to eleven with horrible deformities. Imagine if we continued to breed chihuahuas to have bigger heads and smaller bodies until they are 90% head. Or breed a breed of hound to be smaller with increasingly bigger ears until it's 90% ears. They would still be dogs of the same species because they can procreate together.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Its exactly like that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago

🔫🌼 Always has been.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

cabbage, to be more accurate

[–] [email protected] 68 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Always a relevant xkcd, isn't there

[–] [email protected] 50 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

And every one fucking delicious

[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

People have some hate boner against Brussels sprouts, but damn - if you know how to prepare them, they're delicious.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Selective breeding does play a role but also how you prepare them. Just like other brassicae if you cook them for too long they start smelling bad, so you want to use high heat and relatively short cooking times.

For example. My go-to approach is to cut them into halves and pan-fry in lard. High fire. People claim it's delicious.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago

I mean, things fried in lard do usually come out delicious.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

Right, when I was growing up, always steamed or boiled - absolute trash. Just throw them on a pan under the broiler with some oil and salt/pepper chefs kiss

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Look, anything pan fried with butter, salt, black pepper, bacon and a little white wine is going to taste great...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I've had this discussion before, had the "proper way" of preparing them explained to me and made them according to these instructions. Turns out, I just don't like the taste. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Individual tastes are a thing, too. At least someone out there is bound to dislike even the most beloved dishes; the thing, for me, is how many people claim to hate Brussels sprouts, even if they deserve some leafy and greasy love.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Sliced in half and deep fried—in case anyone was wondering.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Wait, but I put mustard on my broccoli...

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like mustard...

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

this meme has some truth in it, in that these six vegetables are all brassica oleracea. but, the factoid in the center of the meme is misleading: brassica oleracea can be many things but (despite brassicaceae being "the mustard and cabbage family") brassica oleracea is not typically called "wild mustard plant".

edit: toned down my refutation; i guess maybe it is sometimes 👀 but i think not really

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Except that it's not the wild mustard plant. It's the wild cabbage plant. Wild mustard is totally different genusv and species.

wild cabbage

wild mustard

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Srsly. What is this bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Does this mean I can put mustard on things instead of eating all these vegetables?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

See, I like vegetables!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This is news to me, but I was always kind of onto cauliflower just being albino broccoli, so not too surprised there.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

We eat like 2 plants. One is brassica mentioned above.

The other one is nightshade. In the nightshade family we find tomatos, aubergine, tobacco, peppers, physalis, potatoes and of course the extremely toxic bella-donna (deadly nightshade)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Just a small correction: you missed an "a" in bella-donna (bella donna means "beautiful woman" in Italian)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago

ancient and medieval europeans went through some shit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (11 children)

Weird how mustard (the condiment) tastes so good yet the cultivars of this particular species all taste horrible to me.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

To all the veggie haters:

Broccoli recipe:

  1. Fry broccoli with paprika and small pieces of meat or tofu in a pan until brown.
  2. Add water and seasonings.
  3. Steam to desired hardness.
  4. Serve with rice or couscous.

Cauliflower recipe:

  1. Make brown butter by heating up butter and adding breadcrumbs to soak it up.
  2. Serve it on enough steamed cauliflower to justify the amount of brown butter you are about to eat.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Hard no. Extremely hard no. This is the kind of crap our parents would make and serve.

For anyone with taste buds, let's be abundantly clear on something: steaming vegetables is perhaps the WORST way to cook them.

Unless you are eating them raw, or using them as an ingredient in a larger dish, almost all vegetables should be roasted/grilled to bring out and caramelize their natural sugars. Steaming them strips away a lot of the nutrients and flavors, leaving you with tasteless mush. Like you're cooking the soul out of them and leaving only a sad memory of what they could have been.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Hard no. Extremely hard no. This is the kind of crap our parents would make and serve.

For anyone with taste buds, let's be abundantly clear on something: steaming vegetables is perhaps the WORST way to cook them.

I'm sorry your parents were terrible cooks. Steamed veggies can be very delicious what done right, and it's not that difficult to do.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide

This is just patently false. Steaming vegetables preserves more nutrients than both boiling and grilling. Plus, anything caramelized has Acrylamide in it.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

mustard on the beat, yo

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Even the etymological family is a mess. They all backtrack to Latin caulis stalk, stem, cabbage stem; but even in closely related language varieties they might mean different plant varieties, like

  • Galician, general - col wild kale/cabbage/whatever, collards
  • Galician, south - couva~couve kale
  • Portuguese - couve kale
  • Spanish - col cabbage

...and of course people had to reborrow the word from Latin to refer to stems in general, to make the thing even messier. (e.g. PT "caule" stem)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's wild how many times that root has been reborrowed for different vegetable names

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, it’s wild how many times that root has been reborrowed for different vegetable names

The root is the same, but the stems and leaves are all different!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

scientific name

uppercase species

not even underlined or italicized

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Wow, 7 bad flavors out of one plant. What a record

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

They're delicious if cooked properly. I'm a lazy bastard and just microwave steam my cauliflower and broccoli though.

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