Notes from the Underground

We dig root vegetables for their endless adaptability, cool-weather abundance, and weird beauty.

- Stacy Adimando

Where ground has been dug, the soil, which has been moved, aerated and mixed, becomes more fertile,” writes historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. According to her book A History of Food, about 10,000 years ago, the simple act of hungry nomads unearthing wild roots from the soil may have been the first step toward intentional farming. As they dug, early humans turned to sharp sticks and pointed stones to mine the soil, noticing that the plowed ground would produce more food over time. Rather than just collect plants, they began to cultivate them.

With the dawn of domesticated agriculture, there quickly arose the need to store, protect, and distribute resources. Put simply, the root may very well be the root of organized society. And by this theory, it’s among the most historically significant food we have.

Thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, starchy, subterranean roots and their subcategories, tubers and bulbs, were already comfort food. Anthropologists believe that early man learned to dig for these caloric treasures from hominids, like chimps, that had already been eating them for millions of years. To the hunter-gatherers who stumbled upon the wild shoots and spangled leaves coming up through the forest floor, these roots represented survival for at least another day.