DIVERSIFY YOUR VEGETABLE GARDEN
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VEGETABLE GARDENS AS CULTURAL CROSSROADS • BY VALÉRIE LEVÉE
PHOTO André Sarrazin
PHOTO Shutterstock/benjamas11
The vegetables grown in Québec gardens are so familiar to us that we’ve forgotten where they come from. Yet they bear witness to cultural exchanges of the past. Green beans originally from Mexico are now grown alongside potatoes from Peru and cabbage brought from Europe. Even so-called “Italian tomatoes” don’t actually come from Italy, as their ancestral varieties originally came from South America. And then there’s zucchini. While it’s true that it gets its name from a small squash native to Italy, the ancestral squash from which it is derived is originally from North America. But our diet today is far more varied than what we can get from the typical Québec vegetable plot. What we eat is continually being enriched by input from the Indigenous and cultural communities, and our vegetable gardens evolve with these trends.
