- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
-
Hivestorm1 year ago in Pleiotropy
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Variety of Life
-
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?3 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
Daily routine3 years ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China4 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM5 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV7 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!7 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!8 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez8 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens9 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl11 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House12 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs12 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby12 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Lincolnland needs a state vegetable? Well, don't nominate a fruit!
When it comes to crops here in Lincolnland, there are two, maize and soybeans. In terms of value nothing else comes close. Some 4th graders decided that the state needed an official vegetable, and one of our legislators with nothing else to do decided to help, so they are nominating sweet corn as the state vegetable. Except of course, it's technically a fruit, an immature caryopsis with sugary endosperm, i.e., a cereal grain. It's hard to know if Lincolnland has any vegetables of note; maybe asparagus. Now of course this is a repeat of the all too annoying problem of usage versus botany. Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits. And so are cereal grains. Now apparently our citizens each eat on average something like 50 lbs of sweet corn, but is that the weight at harvest? As you know, you buy sweet corn by the ear (infructescence) and the husks and cob are not eaten and discarded, and you hardly know where to put a high carb "vegetable" like this in the food pyramid. And of course when you got 4th graders doing the voting it skews things a bit toward the tastes of a younger cohort. According to their criteria the state "vegetable" should probably be squash, marketed as canned "pumpkin", for which the state is actually famous (pumpkin capital of the USA) but does that bounce it back into the fruit category where it actually belongs? Who knows. Go for it kids.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment