Upon returning from any grand trip such as this, everyone asks: HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?!

I long to wiggle out of answering this question. I’d like to say so much, but these questions typically occur between volleyball games as you line up to take a sip of water. How can I say something thoughtful and eloquent, my mouth dribbling with water?

My mother and I spent 2 weeks in China in October, 1 week in the capital Beijing and 1 week in the southwestern city of Chongqing. The following anecdote sums up the bewilderment that was this trip. Imagine, you are sitting in your hotel room on the thirteenth floor….

You are hungry. You open Google Maps to peruse the local food options. There appears to be no food in the area. Hmm… You decide to take a casual stroll around the neighborhood.

Your epic journey begins with crossing a busy street, with cars, bikes, motorbikes, and foot travelers whizzing by you at every turn regardless of what color the light is. It all flows seamlessly and no one dies. Nearby, a random guy is randomly doing tai chi next to a random bush.

As it turns out, there are dozens of places with food just across this street. Despite choosing a place with pictures, you are only 50% sure of what you ordered. You gaze up at the wall and note the restaurant is called “Moderate Warm Feelings Interaction.” Fun!

The beans you ordered are so salty you feel like throwing up. You try to communicate this to the staff but they are confused. Google Translate has probably told them you are done with your saline bag. You experience less than moderately warm feelings about this interaction. You leave.

Still hungry, you pass by five restaurants, three bakeries, and two nut and seed vendors. Still on the same block.

The convenience store has milk that appears to be approved by cats. Or maybe it’s for cats? I enjoy not knowing for the rest of my life.

You see a window filled with unrelated but tasty-looking edible items and a long line. Now, this makes a lot of sense! You point to the duck leg, three sesame buns, and NOT at the duck heads. Although they are probably good, you’ve experienced enough edible excitement for one day.

Gnawing on your duck leg, you broach the busy street again. The bustle has only increased as the masses grow in their hunger and post-work urgency. You approach your hotel thinking you’ve seen it all just in this one trivial stroll to satisfy hunger.

You have not. There is now a man with a llama on a leash outside of your towering hotel in the middle of this bustling metropolis. The llama is hungry too.  He’s feasting on the tai chi bush. You go to bed and do it all over again the next day.

One friend put a fun twist on the “how was your trip?!” question: If you had to sum up China in two words, what would they be?

Here’s two words: sweet olive. Imagine everywhere you go you are enveloped in a sweet, tantalizing fragrance as if god plugged in a gigantic world air freshener. Soon, I discovered it was the blooming season for sweet olive, also known as sweet osmanthus. We had arrived just in time for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.

Another two words: no English. Translating the minutia of your daily existence gets tiring, but it also forces you to realize just how much language controls our worldview. Upon encountering the vast hordes of people that live in China, most of whom don’t speak English, the significance truly hits. The number of people who can speak both English and Chinese is comparatively quite small, which means that our view of the world’s second most populous and third largest country is constrained by the perspectives of the small number of people who can speak both Chinese and English. And that doesn’t even take into account the unpredictable translations.

Speaking of unpredictable translations, here are a few of my favorites:

• Six-foot travelers (insects)
• Earth Dragon (The Great Wall)
• Leftover Lady (women who aren’t married by the time they’re 30)
• Duck shit tea (actual menu item encountered at a cat coffee shop)

Yet another two words: unfathomable abundance. The sheer magnitude of manufacturing and production was an experience all on its own. Imagine walking into a store and seeing 50 different pairs of furry slippers, all less than $5. Wow! Should I get some? Then you walk a little further and realize there are 10 more stores within a 100 ft radius selling the same, possibly trivially different slippers. Then you realize you are just on one tiny bustling block in one tiny bustling neighborhood in a city of millions and millions of people and millions (billions?) of slippers.

More two words: Weeping willows. Cooking oil. Multigenerational parks. Constant motion. Poetic harmony.

China is a busy place, and it is a place where people pay attention to details. No street was unswept. No block was unwatched. Trees had scientific labels attached to them for nerds like me. The plant lady within me was more than satisfied.

Why restrict to two words? How about feeling completely mentally obliterated by one of the most intense bouts of speech-dulling wonder and bewilderment heretofore experienced in one’s life? How’s that for volleyball water fountain talk?

The radish: that beaming red crunchy and spicy lunch snack. Like many of the “modern” vegetables pumped out to us at “modern” grocery stores, the real story is much more diverse. There are in fact many radishes of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and they aren’t all just for munching or adding to salads. Welcome to radishes around the world.

Radishes are one of the most exciting vegetables to me, not in terms of the quantity that I consume but for what they represent: They are one of the first things you can plant (and harvest) in the midwestern climate. After months of winter, the bright red radish is a shock of life, held daintily by its bright green stalks, reminding us of glorious edible things to come.

Many know radish for its piquant, spicy bite. It is a member of the Brassicaceae family along with its relatives broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and many more. All parts of the radish are edible: from the leaves to the root (aka the “radish”) to the fruiting pods (more on that later).

History and Botanical Context

It took a long journey from the original wild radishes to the perfectly round, cherry-like radishes we commonly see in supermarkets. The modern radish with all its varieties is a subspecies of the wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum subsp. sativus). Wild radishes originate from southeast Asia. The first domesticated radishes appeared in India, central China, and central Asia.

Domesticated radishes appeared in Europe before the Romans (Roman radish stew, anyone?). The Egyptians used radish seed oil before olive oil, and radishes comprised a part of Egyptian laborers’ diets along with onions and garlic (and beer). Both Greeks and Romans used radishes to promote sleep.

Radishes spread through medieval Europe and went on to became one of first European crops introduced to the Americas. The round red radishes with which we are most familiar didn’t begin to appear until the late 1500s in Italy. Prior to that, medieval Europeans ate radishes that were larger and longer, such as the Black Spanish radish.

Today, radishes are 2% of global vegetable production by volume. Wild radishes still grow but are often deemed invasive. The wild radish does not have the swollen root that we know so fondly as “the radish”; domesticated varieties were developed to make this the dominant feature of the plant.

So Many Radishes, So Little Time

The red globe radish is delightful, but there are so many more different kinds: French breakfast, Spanish, watermelon, daikon, and many more that aren’t even for munching but rather for agricultural or oilseed production.

Overall, we can classify them into three main types: the summer or European radishes (small and fast growing), the winter radishes such as Daikon types, and seed pod radishes.

Spring/summer/European radishes are comparatively small and quick growing:

Winter radishes are larger and longer growing, often needing until fall to be ready for harvest:

Seed pod radishes are grown for their seed pods, often pickled and served with meat or beer.

Different Culinary Traditions

There are many ways to eat radish beyond just munching them, from roasting and grating to steaming and frying. And, radishes leaves can be used in potato soup or sautéed as a side dish.

Debate abounds about whether radishes should be cooked. “Jane Grigson declared that it’s nothing less than an ‘insult’ to a good radish to do anything with it except devour it whole. Radishes… ‘clear the taste and prepare for food and drink,’ she declares in her invaluable Vegetable Book” (Fearnley-Whittingstall, 2012). Thus, at their most elemental level, radishes are an appetizer. Served with salt for dipping, possibly even with bread and butter, radishes make a surprisingly satisfying snack.

Many people around the world eat radishes for breakfast, including the Dutch, Japanese, Koreans, and Russians. Early Dutch colonists “would have sugared tea, bread, butter and radishes for breakfast” (Cook’s Info, 2004). According to William Woys Weaver (1997), radishes were once served at every meal in colonial America.

Radishes play an important role in Asian cuisine, particularly the daikon and similar types, which are pickled and made into cakes. Daikon radishes are among the best-selling vegetables in Japan, where the “tops are chopped up finely and pickled. The root is either eaten raw or pickled and used sometimes in cooking or added to stir fry components, stews and soups.”

Other ways to eat radishes:

• Spring radish salad
• Grilled, braised or baked radishes
• Grated onto pasta
• Chimol salsa, a Salvadoran radish salsa for meat
• Radish relish or jelly
• Radish butter
• Radish soup or Chinese daikon soup
• Russian style black radishes
• Hash browns
• You could even put them on pizza!

As for the pods, they can be eaten fresh, steamed, boiled, stir fried, and pickled. Pickled radish pods can be used as a substitute for capers.

Beyond Eating

Radishes aren’t just for eating. Some are used to improve the soil: Some daikon-type radishes are used as a cover crop, to increase soil fertility, prevent erosion or soil compaction, and suppress weeds.

In Japan and Korea, radish dolls are made as children’s toys. The radish is also one of the five plants of the Japanese Festival of Seven Herbs.

References

Cook’s Info. (2004). Breakfast radishes. https://www.cooksinfo.com/breakfast-radishes

Fearnley-Whittingstall, H. (2012). Crunch time: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s radish recipes. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/may/18/radish-recipes-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall

Woys Weaver, W. (1997). Heirloom Vegetable Gardening. Henry Holt and Company.