Plant

Lettuce

Lactuca sativa

Also known as: Lactuca sativa

An annual leafy plant in the daisy family (Asteraceae) — domesticated in ancient Egypt at least 4,500 years ago, originally for its oil-rich seeds and only later for the now-familiar edible leaves. The world's most-consumed leaf vegetable. The principal cultivar groups span the morphological range from soft butterhead and loose-leaf forms to crisp romaine and iceberg, to the stem-eaten celtuce.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons — see source for license.

Scientific

Lactuca sativa descends from Lactuca serriola (prickly lettuce, a weedy roadside species across Eurasia). The cultivated species’ transformation from the bitter, latex-bearing wild form into the mild leafy vegetable we eat is the product of millennia of selection against bolting (premature flowering) and against the bitter sesquiterpene compounds of the wild plant.

Principal cultivar groups:

Crisphead / iceberg — dense, tight, mild
Romaine / cos — upright, sturdier leaves
Butterhead / Boston / Bibb — soft, loosely packed
Loose-leaf — no head, oak-leaf and others
Stem lettuce / celtuce — Chinese; the stem rather than the leaves is eaten

Cultural

Egyptian tomb paintings (~4,500 years old) depict lettuce as an upright stem-form crop associated with the fertility god Min — the species was sacred and ritually significant. The cultivated transformation into the head-and-leaf form most familiar today was a slow process across the Roman, medieval Mediterranean, and Renaissance periods.

The 20th-century industrial salad complex (iceberg-as-default, factory-washed, plastic-bagged) is a recent and culturally specific story; for most of the species’ cultivated history, lettuce was a garden vegetable eaten close to where it was grown.

Global production

Top producers: China, USA, India, Spain, Italy.

Sources

FAO Crop Statistics
Wikipedia — Lettuce

A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].

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Practical

shares approach with

Arugula arugula and lettuce together cover most home salad production; succession-plant both
Watercress both leafy greens grown for fresh market; watercress demands flowing water or wet soil

produces

General