Domestification II

Where and how did radishes arise? While enjoying one of these little darlings last week, I started wondering about this and decided for fun to make some best guesses based on what little I know of the domestification and spread of starchy food plants (e.g. sweet potatoes, maize, manioc etc) from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Colin Tudge's So Shall We Reap and that newly discovered treasure, Stephen Mithen's After the Ice.



Your radish is tuberous, and a first guess was to bunch it with carrots, turnip, beets or parsnip which share crunchy, sweet taproots. Its name would comes from a central European root word radizh, reflecting origins in the biodiverse mediterranean environment and adoption by settlers of the valleys of the Caucasus, whence it spread westward to become salad radish and horseradish, and eastward where it developed into the pale giant radishes like the Indian subcontinent's mooli and Japan's daikon. It's a reasonable guess that it will have reached northern Europe with the Romans (like many other plants and animals).

The truth was stranger than the guesses. Your radish is a cultivar of Raphanus sativus and a closely related thus to brassicas such as broccoli, kale and watercress. Such Cruciferae also include turnips and beets as speculated, but the carrot/parsnip connection is not borne out, as should've been guessed by the non-radishy lacy foliage of Umberelliferae. The etymology of radish is attributed to Latin radix, and not a Slavic or Turkic root, although ancestral forms may have arisen up to 3,000 years ago either in China or the Caucasus. Radishes were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but apparently did not reach the British Isles until the 16th century.

Radish sculpture festivals feature in Oaxaca and China- think about that next time your enjoying a crunchy, spicy little tastebomb,