On Food and Cooking

Vascular tissue runs through the ground tissue, and resembles our veins and arteries. It is the system of micros ...

and older tissues, and has a dull, corky appearance. Our culinary experience of periderm is usually limited to ...

Fibrous vascular tissue and thick dermal layers are common causes of toughness in vegetables. Plant Orga ...

of storage and vascular tissue, and in some varieties these accumulate different pigments, so thei ...

identical — plant. The common potato and true yam are such swollen underground stem tips called tubers, w ...

as 70% air by volume. This structure helps explain why leafy vegetables shrink so much when cooked: ...

bases store water and carbohydrates during the plant’s first year of growth so that they can be used duri ...

dispersal away from the mother plant. Some fruits are inedible — they’re designed to catch the wind, or t ...

construction of their cell walls, and the amount of water held in by those walls. The cell walls of o ...

and presses the surrounding cytoplasm (p. 261) against the cell membrane, which in turn presses agains ...

pressure to break through them. The moist vegetable is crisp and juicy, the limp one chewy ...

is so extreme that the walls have practically disintegrated, and the watery cell interior oozes out ...

into a gel that fills the spaces between cellulose fibers. Pectins can be either dissolved or consolidated b ...

it’s the most abundant plant product on earth. Like starch, cellulose consists of a chain of glucose su ...

makes vegetables permanently stringy, and the only remedy is to pull the fibers from the tissue. One last ...

actually become part of our eye, and some made possible the very existence of us and our eyes (see ...

are made up of a framework of cellulose fibers embedded in a mass of amorphous materials, including th ...

system. Each chlorophyll molecule is made up of two parts. One is a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms w ...

member of this large family to be chemically isolated came from carrots. These pigments absorb blue ...

chlorophylls. Their main role there is to protect chlorophyll and other parts of the photosynthetic ...