To coincide with Meat Free Week we present a selection of our favourite vegetable facts
We're in the midst of the inaugural Meat Free Week in the UK. A vegetarian’s dream come true, the global campaign, which started in Australia in 2013, encourages to reduce the amount of meat we consume, in a step towards a healthier lifestyle and a more sustainable living. From cancer preventative to weight loss and planet preservation, the positives of going meat free are numerous. To coincide with the initiative, here we present a selection of intriguing facts alongside our favourite beautiful and brilliant vegetable photographic moments, courtesy of The Gourmand, Sarah Lucas and more.
1. From white to red and purple, carrots used to exist in a multitude of colours – in honour of William of Orange, a Dutch botanist hybridised the vegetable to produce the orange variety we have today.
2. It wasn’t until 1893 that tomatoes were officially acknowledged as vegetables.
3. Due to their testicular shape, bean seedlings were used as love-charms in Ancient India.
4. As of today, there are nearly two million #vegetables posts on Instagram, and 1,630 under #vegetableporn.
5. Donatella Versace once said, "I don't even know what my natural colour is. Natural? What is natural? What is that? I do not believe in totally natural for women. For me, natural has something to do with vegetables."
6. Made into a tasty sauce by Fiji’s natives to accompany their human flesh meals, the cannibal tomato is actually a type of aubergine.
7. 16th century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo used vegetables to create visionary Mannerist portraits showcasing the intimate correlation between human and nature.
8. A negative calorie food, celery might be your waistline’s best friend, but if eaten in excess, it could starve you to death.
9. In modern Greek folklore, garlic is still thought to make sexual abstinence easier.
10. Star of the current Céline campaign Joan Didion once wrote, "When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal."
11. In a practice reaching far back thousands of years, vegetable fibers were used to make the first tampons.
12. Frank Zappa's Call Any Vegetable is a ballad dedicated to our green pals. Recorded on tape by Carlos Santana, the American musician sang these words on a San Francisco stage in 1970, "Call any vegetable, pick up the phone, think of a vegetable lonely at home. Call any vegetable and the chances are good that the vegetable will respond to you."
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