Do you think of vegetables as being alive?

Most of us intuitively think of cutting a plant down, cutting off a branch, or digging up a root as separating that excised piece from the live part of the plant, and it's only a matter of time until the piece withers and dies. A lettuce leaf, once cut, can't recover and the head will grow no more--and the forgotten summer tomato quickly melts on the counter leaving behind only its finished product: the seeds.

But other vegetables are quite different... not dead and done, but alive, waiting. Their cells are respiring, warding off rot for months at a time until the warmth of spring arrives to move some collection of cells to action. From that mass grows a shoot, a leaf, and soon, a plant. We're all familiar with this from potatoes sprouting on the kitchen counter, and it isn't so inconceivable that some structure on a potato (the eyes) knows how to grow into a plant. What astonishes me every year though, is onions.

Onions seem complete, dead tops and paper-skinned. They seem to follow the familiar course from vibrancy to death, the way a winter squash plant grows and dies to leave behind the butternut. Every year, though, there are inevitably some odd onions left over somewhere on the farm—unsaleable, half-rotten culls left in a shed, some tiny onions in the cooler—all of which freeze and thaw and freeze again throughout the depths of winter, and seem entirely inanimate, if not decomposing. But then in spring, there they are—onion shoots wending their way towards the sun! In the fridge at home too, every year a delightful, almost comical, surprise—onions trying to grow their way out of their paper bag, out of the fridge, inevitably becoming the first fresh leafy green vegetables of the new year.

Somehow, pulled from the ground for nine months, frozen over winter, left without any care in conditions that would kill any other vegetable, each one of those cells knows what to do when the time comes. Each layer of onion is indistinguishable from the next, no kernel or germ in the center, it’s onion all the way through and yet: they know to divide, to build a green shoot entirely different from what was there before, and, as it grows, it consumes the energy stored over winter in the eatable onion, leaving it a withered husk as the new plant grows tall. It's exactly the inverse of what's happening with these onions right now: the onion leaves growing in the field put energy into the bulb and will decline and die as the bulb expands. The onion we eat isn't an end-point, but a mid-point. It's no surprise then that these are the vegetables that store the longest: onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots. Rather than being dead and finished with their life cycle, they're just in a holding pattern biding their time until the next phase.