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Pineapples and Brussel Sprouts: These were the inspirations for my website. I had
grown up in the fifties with a backyard vegetable garden and naively assumed that my experience of growing lettuce, raspberries, broccoli and other common fruits and
vegetables was sufficient to understanding how most of our food is grown.
Then one summer, we planted Brussel Sprouts. I was amazed by the growth pattern of this plant: Like most others I had seen, it sprouted and grew leaves like any “normal”
plant. It grew to a height of about 24” - but then the sprouts began to emerge underneath the leaves of the plant - top to bottom. They grew all along the stalk unlike any vegetable I had ever seen.

This childhood memory was filed away and mostly forgotten until my daughter, Sasha,
who lives in Panama, expressed great delight in relating how pineapples grow and are
propagated: Much to my surprise, I learned that each plant produces only one pineapple, and it takes four to five years for the fruit to mature! If you cut the green top off a pineapple and plant it, another pineapple plant will grow and fruit in another five
years. And in the meat of the pineapple itself, under every “eye” or bump you see on
the outside skin, you’ll find a tiny seed that can also be planted to produce more
pineapples. So one pineapple is capable of producing more than 50 new plants and
each of those can produce 50 more and so on and so forth...

Who knew (other than pineapple growers, of course)?

Agriculture has evolved into big industry in the 21st century. Most city kids see the fruits
and vegetables they eat neatly displayed at the local grocery store or supermarket and
never imagine how they grow, how they’re harvested or where in the world they come
from. Subdivisions and suburbs have pushed out the small farms that used to dot the
countryside, so even kids living in rural areas haven’t had the privilege of seeing how
their food grows. And most adults are familiar with how common foods grow - like
apples and oranges - but few have ever seen an pineapple plant or a cranberry bog.
Please enjoy surfing through www.howfoodgrows.com and prepare to be astonished by the ingenuity of Mother Nature in offering us a seemingly endless cornucopia of delicious fruits and vegetables.

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