One of the most common food items consumed today are cruciferous vegetables.

Even if you aren't familiar with the term, you almost certainly have consumed some before,

and there's a good chance you do so on a regular basis.

What many people don't know is that these vegetables are actually

rather modern. Early Neolithic humans never ate broccoli, cabbage, or brussels sprouts because humans

invented these foods.

Learn more about cruciferous vegetables and where they came from

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. If you're not familiar with the term cruciferous vegetable, then you're almost

certainly familiar with cruciferous vegetables themselves.

Cruciferous vegetables are an entire category of vegetables that includes a wide variety of plants

that seem at first to be very different.

Without going through an exhaustive list, here are some cruciferous vegetables that you might be familiar with.

Cale, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, red cabbage,

calerabi, Chinese kale, and savoy cabbage.

And that list isn't even close to being comprehensive,

but it demonstrates the wide number of very common vegetables that are considered to be cruciferous vegetables.

So why are they called cruciferous vegetables?

It comes from the Latin word cruci-feri, which means cross-bearing, which is due to the four leaves the plants have and how they're arranged.

Many of the vegetables I've listed, like broccoli, are ones that you might have consumed without ever having seen their leaves.

All of these vegetables are plants in the family Brassacacy.

In addition to these vegetables I've listed, it includes mustard plants and plants such

as rape seed, which is what canola oil is made out of.

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