How often do you pause to consider how the food on your table actually grows from the ground: What kind of plant does it come from, and how is it processed? Some of the most common foods are also some of the most remarkable. Chocolate, cashews, pepper corn, baby corn, cinnamon, wasabi, pineapple, kiwi, sesame seeds, saffron, asparagus. Do you know how they grow?
1. Cashew
Why are cashews one of the more expensive nuts you can buy? It’s because each cashew is actually the single seed of a mango-sized fruit called the cashew apple. The seed hangs from the bottom of the inverted heart-shaped fruit. Cashews are complicated to process because what we eat as the nut is encased in two layers of shell—which happen to contain a toxic oil similar to the toxin in poison ivy. So to get at the edible part of the nut, the whole thing must first be roasted to destroy the toxin.
The cashew apple meanwhile is delicate and sweet with a tangy aftertaste. It’s also high in tannins, which leaves that dry feeling in your mouth (like eating an underripe banana). In places like Brazil, the fruit is very popular and eaten fresh or used to make juice, syrup, wine, and glazed fruit. In some Latin American countries, the fruit is so prized that the troublesome nuts are thrown away. However, the fruit is also highly perishable so in other countries, like Thailand, cashew nuts are the big export product and the troublesome, odd-tasting fruit is usually discarded.
2. Baby corn
Baby corn is not a miniature variety of corn as some people think. It’s actually regular corn that is picked before it’s pollinated so it never matures. Any variety of corn can be harvested as baby corn. Sometimes it’s a primary crop, meaning it’s planted to produce baby corn; or it can be a secondary crop grown as regular sweet corn, with some being picked early. In either case, the corn stalk must still grow to about 6 feet before it’s harvested (making it a less than ideal choice for window-box gardening).
3. Cinnamon
Cinnamon is the inner bark of the semi-tropical Cinnamomun zeylancium, or Ceylon cinnamon tree, native to Sri Lanka. This is known as “true” cinnamon. It is often confused with cassia, also called Chinese or Vietnamese cinnamon, which is actually the dominant type used in commercial production today. So most of the cinnamon we buy isn’t in fact true cinnamon.
True cinnamon is more aromatic than cassia and has a less assertive flavor. The leaves of both plants are also fragrant, and are often used to flavor cinnamon tea.
Cinnamon trees can grow to roughly 50 feet, but are usually kept to under 8 feet under cultivation. The branches are cut to produce the spice. After the branches are harvested, the farmer must keep them moist for 1-2 days to make the bark easier to separate. Then the leaves and twigs are removed and the outer bark is scraped off. The precious inner bark is then carefully removed off by slicing underneath it in long parallel cuts. This is what results in the characteristic cinnamon curl. Long curls of bark are layered together in bundles creating the familiar cinnamon stick. After the long sticks are dried, they are cut down into a convenient, commercial length of a few inches.
4. Chocolate (Cocoa Bean)
Chocolate is made from the dried, fermented beans that grow inside the fruit of the cocoa tree. The football-sized pods grow directly out from the tree’s trunk or on large branches. Inside the pods, the seeds are surrounded by a light-colored, pulp that is tasty and sweet, but tastes nothing like chocolate. There are roughly 30-50 seeds in each pod.
The seeds start out white or light lavender then turn darker as they dry and ferment. The beans are further dried in an oven then crushed in a mill to remove the papery skin leaving behind cacao nibs, which is the purest form of cacao. It’s processed from there into the many different forms we buy as chocolate.
5. Wasabi
Wasabi is a root that grows in cool, moist, mountainous areas or under a forest canopy in nature. Under cultivation, it is grown in heavy shade in shallow, cold running water. It can take 3 years for the plant to reach maturity. Because wasabi is rather difficult and expensive to grow, much of the so-called wasabi on the market today is fake—it’s actually a mixture of regular horseradish, mustard, and food coloring.
Fresh grated wasabi naturally forms a creamy paste and is an essential ingredient for sushi. It also loses its flavor very quickly after grating if left uncovered. Wasabi leaves can also be eaten and share the same spicy flavor as the root.
In Japan, sawa wasabi is most expensive because it is grown naturally. Wasabi is cultivated in Japan, parts of China, Taiwan, Korea, New Zealand, and some success has been had in the rain forests on the Oregon Coast and parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee.
6. Pineapple
Pineapple is remarkably easy to grow. They don’t have usable seeds, so you can simply cut off the top (crown), of any pineapple and plant it. You can also plant the slips (baby plants that grow out of a mature plant) or suckers. They don’t need much water and can grow in marginal soil, and even thrive in a pot or tub.
The pineapple plant has a very short, stout stem with a rosette of long waxy needles that look like ground cover. So the fruit, which grows upright, appears to grow right out of the ground and each plant only bears one fruit.
Pineapple takes a long time to flower and fruit, depending on what part of the plant you start with—12 months for slips and 24 months or more for crowns. But once you have a few pineapples in the garden, they multiply easily on their own so you'll have fruit for years to come.
Pineapple are native to Brazil and Paraguay, but were spread throughout South and Central America and the West Indies by native populations. Columbus took the fruit back to Spain and they spread to rest of the world on sailing ships that carried them to counter scurvy. The word “pineapple” comes from Spanish explorers who named it “pina” for pine cone, then the English added “apple” after a juicy fruit they were familiar with.
7. Kiwi
Kiwi, also known as “Chinese gooseberry,” is not native to New Zealand. It originates in China, specifically in the Yangtze River valley in the north, and Zhejiang Province on the eastern coast. It was brought to New Zealand in 1904 as a novelty item by a school headmistress after visiting her missionary sister in China. But by the end of World War II, it was an important export crop for New Zealand.
Kiwis are actually berries that grow on vines and are cultivated on arbors similar to grapes. Male and female plants must be grown close together to bear fruit and the fruit is highly sensitive to weather changes—a warm or cold spell can kill the whole plant or result in few flowers. The kiwifruit is also a challenge to pollinate because bees reportedly don’t find the flowers very attractive.
8. Sesame Seed
The sesame plant is one of the oldest known crops to be cultivated by humans, going back some 5,000 years. The seeds were popularly eaten by Roman soldiers to help them replenish.
Sesame grows to 5-6 feet in height; it has broad leaves to collect plenty of sunlight. Large bell-shaped flowers grow out from the stem and inside each flower are the seeds. Different colored seeds come from different varieties of the plant. Sesame seed and oil is used in many places in the world, particularly the Middle East and Asia, but eating the sesame leaf is a specialty of Korean cuisine.
9. Saffron
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. That’s because it is the dried stigmas of the purple saffron crocus flower. It takes roughly 75,000 flowers to produce 1 pound of the spice, which is almost entirely harvested by hand. Fortunately, only a tiny amount is needed in cooking since adding too much can make the food bitter. Ancient Egyptians also used this plant to dye clothes.
10. Asparagus
Cultivating asparagus is a long-term proposition. Grown from seed, asparagus starts out as fern-like plant and takes about 2 years to reach maturity. You could plant a 1-year-old crown to get a year jumpstart, but mature plants don’t transplant well. However, once mature, asparagus is perennial and will grow back each season for 20 years or more. The mature asparagus shoot can be harvested by cutting it down to about the diameter of a pencil. It then rests over winter and will grow again in the spring.
11. Peppercorn
Pepper is the most widely used spice in the world, but have you ever wondered about the difference between black, white, green, and pink pepper?
The peppercorn plant, or piper nigrum, is an evergreen vine with dark green, oval leaves. It grows on trees or trellises under cultivation. All along the vine hang spikes with clusters of 150 or more berries, or drupes. The berries start out green and become darker, and spicier, as they ripen. If they’re picked when green, the flavor is relatively mild—it’s often cooked in clusters in green curry in Thailand. Most commonly the berries are picked black and are the peppercorns we’re most familiar with.
White pepper is actually black pepper that’s left to overripen. When the black shell is removed the inside is white and the berry is at its spiciest.
Pink peppercorns are from a different plant entirely. They are the berries of the baies rose plant, also known as the Brazilian pepper tree. It’s a tall tree with droopy branches from which clusters of bright pink berries grow. They have lighter peppery taste with a mild citrus flavor. Being the same size as true peppercorn, they’re often mixed with the others to make a colorful spice blend.
