Origins

Chard's true home, as best botanists have been able to tell, is probably Sicily, a large island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy. It's a descendent of something called a sea beet which grew wild there in the Mediterranean's salty sea air.

One result of that heritage is that chard is physically tough, much like the members of the cabbage family who descended from the sea cabbage. Like them, chard has big veins and a tough skin. Like them, it's also fairly hardy, easy to grow, and resistant to many bugs and diseases.

Who's your daddy?

The final misunderstanding — that chard is just "a beet without the beet" — reflects the kind of ignorance of and disrespect for history that sometimes bubbles up in cultures in decline.

Is chard, in truth, just a beet without the beet? Not if you know your history. Not if you look at this question from the perspective of parentage — that is, not if your question is "Who's your daddy?"

Which of these two vegetables has been around the longest? Who comes from whom? Is chard just an incomplete, underdeveloped beet? Or is the beet a more youthful, beefed up, more musclebound chard?

Historically, the latter formulation is more correct. Chard has been around for thousands of years, at least 10 times as long as beets have been on the scene. Chard goes all the way back to the beautiful Hanging Gardens of Babylon, south of Baghdad, in what is now Iraq. In contrast, beets are one of the vegetable world's truest Johnny-come-lately's. They were evolved from chard less than 200 years ago, first, as a way to grow sugar, then as feed for farm animals, and finally as something for us at the dinner table. All this happened in Germany, Poland, and France, in the early to mid-1800's.

So, who's the daddy here? It's definitely chard. Let's hear no more of this smart talk about how chard — Swiss or otherwise — is just an incomplete, underdeveloped beet.