About Gather and Sow
Welcome to Gather and Sow: The Botanist in the Kitchen Newsletter, our new monthly missive! If you followed our Botanist in the Kitchen blog on the old Wordpress site, we thank you. We will henceforth be posting online content here on our new site, powered by Ghost, in newsletter format. We intend to post new issues of Gather and Sow every month. Content on the old blog will generally remain available, and we will continue to announce newsletter issue publication there. We remain dedicated to illuminating the fascinating biology of our food plants.
Each issue of Gather and Sow will feature three components:
- Food for Thought: an essay, possibly seasonal or inspired by current events
- Botany Lab of the Month: a botany lesson for the hands-on learner, packaged as an activity or recipe designed for the home kitchen
- Baker’s Dozen and Gleanings: We highlight thirteen-ish recent research articles and other relevant media, respectively, that further our understanding of the biology of our food plants.
FAQ: Aren’t you two writing a book? Is it done yet? Yes, we are writing The Botanist in the Kitchen book. No, it is not done yet. We have an agent (Hi Lucy!). And a book proposal document. We are close to being done with our sample chapters. Hopefully a publisher will take interest very soon. We’ll post updates with the newsletters.
We would love to hear from you.
You can subscribe to Gather and Sow from the Ghost site. We will also publicize newsletters on the old blog and on social media (Bluesky, Facebook). Please email us at botanistinthekitchen@gmail.com.
About Botanist in the Kitchen
A person can learn a lot about plants through the everyday acts of slicing and eating them. This space is devoted to exploring food plants in all their beautiful detail as plants – as living organisms with their own evolutionary history and ecological interactions. Our goal is three-fold: to share the fascinating biology of our food plants, to teach biology using edible, familiar examples, and to suggest delicious ways to bring the plants and their stories to your table.
To judge by the questions we are often asked at dinner parties (“What is an artichoke?” “Why is okra slimy?”), some curious eaters genuinely want to know which plant part they are eating and how its identity affects the characteristics of the food. We delve into such questions here while suggesting recipes and activities that highlight the botanical aspects of food. We think of it as part botany lab, part home cooking show.
We focus on food plants because we love to eat them, and they make terrific botanical subjects: they are familiar and available, their parts have been greatly exaggerated through breeding, and they are usually not dangerous. There would be nothing to talk about here if the plants we eat did not have a history stretching much farther back than 19th-century heirloom varieties or even the dawn of agriculture. Eggplant and okra, rhubarb, artichokes, pomegranates, figs, and Brussels sprouts . . . where did all this vegetative diversity come from? Like all living things, food plants have been shaped by a long and complicated evolutionary history of struggling to survive and reproduce in the midst of others struggling to do just the same.
If the chemical makeup of plants depended on only the basic biochemical processes required to sustain life, plants might all taste pretty much the same – probably watery and a bit green. Instead, the shape and texture of various parts have evolved according to the role that each part plays in the life of the plant, such as support, photosynthesis, storage, or reproduction. The flavors and nutrient content of plant foods also reflect many thousands or even millions of years of co-evolution with animals that disperse their seeds or eat their leaves. In the end, the way plants taste and behave in our kitchens depends on which parts we eat, how those parts function, and the way they interact with friends and foes – all of which are inextricable from evolutionary history.
Thanks so much for visiting our site. We hope you enjoy the plant stories and recipes and that both will make appearances at your table. Please let us know what you think!
About the Authors
The Botanist in the Kitchen is written by Jeanne L. D. Osnas and Katherine A. Preston.
Both Katherine and Jeanne are PhD plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists who love to cook. We are plant nerds with knives. Between us, we have been teaching college courses in basic botany, taxonomy, ecology and evolution for more than 30 years, but we never get tired of looking at plants and learning new things about how they work. We are self-taught cooks with pretty different diets. Katherine is a long-time vegetarian who could eat her weight in broccoli any given day, especially with an excellent baguette. Jeanne is an omnivore, especially fond of wild-caught foods and garden-grown veggies.
Jeanne and Katherine met at Stanford University where Jeanne was an undergraduate and Katherine was a post-doc teaching botany and taxonomy. We became research collaborators but also found a shared interest in using food plants in our classes. Jeanne took her ideas to Princeton as a graduate student, and Katherine continued teaching seminars in “edible botany” at Stanford and Santa Clara University.
In most cases, biology lab and brown bag lunches are strictly incompatible, and for excellent and obvious reasons it is a safety violation to bring any food into a teaching or research lab.
But there is nothing keeping us from bringing biology lab to your kitchen!
We are thrilled that our work is being used in the classroom. If you are an instructor using our content, please let us know about it. We appreciate feedback on knowing what is working or not.