Comment ça pousse

Peanuts

Peanuts, also known as groundnuts or monkey nuts, are the fruit of a plant belonging to the legume family, originally from Argentina and Bolivia They're grown in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions for their oleaginous (oil-producing) seeds. The plants are unusual in that they bury their fruit underground after fertilisation.

Bananas

The banana is the fruit, or botanically speaking the berry, that develops from the flower of the banana tree, which is actually a giant herb and not a tree at all!

Potatoes

The spud (or potato) is an edible tuber produced by the species Solanum tuberosum, a member of the Solanaceae family. The word also refers to the plant itself, which is herbaceous and perennial, thanks to its tubers, but always grown as an annual crop.

Saffron

Saffron comes from a flower, Crocus sativus, the only variety to produce it. And a lot of flowers are needed! It takes 150,000 flowers to produce a kilo of saffron. And not only that, but harvesting it is a particularly delicate job that needs to be done in record time.

Sugar mainly comes from sugar beet and sugar cane. In Switzerland, sugar beet is harvested from September to December. Soon after harvest, the beets are transported to a factory and undergo several processes to extract the sugar.

Chocolate

Strictly speaking chocolate itself doesn't grow. It's made from cacao which comes from a small tree that goes by the name of Theobroma cacao, or more simply, the cacao tree. Cacao pods grow directly on the branches of the tree and contain the cocoa beans used to make chocolate.

Cinnamon

A veritable star in certain countries, cinnamon originally came from Sri Lanka. It is the bark of the cinnamon tree, but the inner not outer bark. After harvesting, the pieces of bark are dried and rolled to form quills, or cinnamon sticks. Smaller pieces are ground for sale as powder.

Star anis

Also known as badian, star anise comes from China where badian trees can grow to a height of around eighteen metres. Once harvested, star anise is dried before being exported around the world.

Cashew nuts

Cashew nuts are the oleaginous seeds produced by cashew apples, the false-fruits of the cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), originally from America's tropical regions. Discovered in Brazil by the Portuguese, 16th century settlers then took them to Mozambique and India. They can now be found in many regions of Asia.