Is it for the plant to store energy and we just simply evolved to take advantage of that?
In: Biology
Look up wild carrot. See how tiny the root is? People found out it’s tasty, so they bred using selective breeding into the massive carrots we have today! It’s quite incredible. The same process was applied to literally any fruit or vegetable we have today. I also recommend looking up what wild bananas or melons look like. The difference is massive
To elaborate, selective breeding is where you take the pieces with the desired trait, let those grow and discard the rest. If you do this enough times, which takes years upon years, you get to increase the desired traits and reduce or get rid of completely of the ones you dislike
This was done with animals too, hence dogs from wolves and such
Yes. Carrots and many other root vegetables use that energy to produce flowers, we just harvest them before they can. Potatoes are a way the plant reproduces. It spreads underground using tubers.
1) Potatoes form allows it to grow in extremely wide range of environments.
2) potatos and carots (and basicly every agreculture product you consume) did not look like that hundreds of years ago. Selection breeding quite drastically deviated from their origin for the purposes of better agreculture.
Pretty much yes. The root is meant to feed the plant’s flower but we harvest them before they flower. We have also selectively bred them to be larger which is something that’s been done with practically every fuirt and vegetable we eat today. Their “wild” versions were never this large.
Basically yes. All vegetables are the parts of plants that have been cultivated (through cross-breeding) to emphasize the part of the plant we like to eat.
Yes it is an energy store. The carrot is just a energy storing root for a flowering plant.
If you leave a carrot in the ground for a second year instead of picking it, it’ll flower and you can get seeds, but the root itself no longer looks like your nice traditional single long carrot, and it gets very hard and woody.
Carrots and potatoes are for energy storage over the winter. Carrots, beets, turnips, and many other root vegetables are biennial. Their natural cycle is to live for two years. Year 1 they grow and store energy, then frost kills the above ground part. Year 2 they grow quickly from stored resources, capture solar energy, and put it into seed production.
Potatoes aren’t strictly biennnial, because they can grow back from roots multiple years, but the idea is the same. They store energy in year one, and produce seeds in the following years.
Check out the brassica oleracea. It’s one plant humans derived different vegetables from (cabbage, brussel sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, broccoli and cauliflower).
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