VEGETABLES AND SOME FRUIT

Our Second Largest Food Group

Francis P. Griffiths, Harold S. Olcott, W. Lawrence Shaw.

The increased American demand for green and leafy vegetables has contributed to an enormously expanded production of truck crops in the past half century. This advance has been aided not only by improved farming practices, but also by effective methods of processing and distribution. In the years 1940 to 1949, the commercial growers marketed a yearly average of about 400 pounds of vegetables per person in our country. Many relatively local truck farms have provided a further quantity, which, although not recorded, is another sizable amount to include. Innumerable farm and city home gardens still provide additional vegetables. Into the American kitchen is going an increasingly larger amount of vegetables, both fresh and processed. A noteworthy portion of the vegetable crops is purchased already canned, frozen, and, in some cases, dried or pickled.

Next to milk and milk products, vegetables lead all other food groups in production and consumption in the United States.

Coupled with a growing consumption of fresh vegetables has been a growing population. Commercial farming has expanded to meet this market. Between 1940 and 1949, production averaged more than 25 million tons a year. Farm value was more than a billion dollars. In 1946, when our farm machine was going full tilt, we raised more than 30 million tons of vegetables; farm value soared to 1,600 million dollars.

We eat the roots or tubers of some plants potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, and sweetpotatoes, for example. We eat the stalks of others celery, rhubarb, asparagus, and broccoli. We eat the leaves of still others spinach, lettuce, chard, cabbage, beet greens, brussels sprouts, and kale. And we eat the ripened portion of some plants that are, or contain, or produce the seed for propagation peas, beans, cauliflower, artichokes, and cucumbers. We call all these parts vegetables.

Nearly all vegetables are available in fresh form for use in the home kitchen during certain parts of the year. Most of them can be processed for use in winter. Generally speaking, the vegetables most commonly canned are those that are the end product, or near-end product, of the plant ( peas, beans, corn, and tomatoes) or the root portions (beets, carrots, and, to a limited extent, potatoes). Asparagus and rhubarb of the stalk group are excellent when canned. Spinach is about the only leafy vegetable canned in quantity.

Freezing preservation widens the field of vegetable types that are processed. To the group that has already been mentioned for canning, we should add broccoli, brussels sprouts, artichokes, and cauliflower as vegetables that make fine frozen products. Other vegetables, notably cucumbers and cabbage, are processed by pickling and fermenting, or both.