Eruca Sativa - Cultivation and History

Cultivation and History

Salad rocket looks like a longer-leaved and open lettuce and is eaten raw, in salads with oil and vinegar, or as a garnish, as well as cooked as a leafy green vegetable. It is rich in vitamin C and potassium. In addition to the leaves, the flowers (often used in salads as an edible garnish), young seed pods, and mature seeds are all edible.

Grown as an edible herb in the Mediterranean area since Roman times, salad rocket was mentioned by various classical authors as an aphrodisiac, most famously by Virgil, whose poem Moretum contains the line: "et veneris revocans eruca morantuem" ("the rocket excites the sexual desire of drowsy people"). Some writers assert that for this reason during the Middle Ages it was forbidden to grow rocket in monasteries. Gillian Reilly, author of the Oxford Companion to Italian Food, states that because of its reputation as a sexual stimulant, it was "prudently mixed with lettuce, which was the opposite" (i.e, calming or even soporific). Reilly continues that "nowadays rocket is enjoyed innocently in mixed salads, to which it adds a pleasing pungency".

Salad rocket was traditionally collected in the wild or grown in home gardens along with such herbs as parsley and basil. It is now grown commercially from the Veneto in Italy to Iowa in the United States to Brazil and is available for purchase in supermarkets and farmers' markets throughout the world. It is also naturalised as a wild plant away from its native range in temperate regions around the world, including northern Europe and North America. In India, the mature seeds are known as Gargeer.

Before the 1980s salad rocket was comparatively little known in the English-speaking world outside of immigrant Italian communities and among devotees of Italian cooking, but by 2006 the green had become a marker for culinary sophistication, upward mobility, multiculturalism, and even elitism. Vanity Fair writer and editor David Kamp gave his book about the spread of American mass-media culinary sophistication the prophetic title: The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Clarkson Potter, 2006). Two years later, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama became associated with arugula:

In 2008, when US presidential candidate Barack Obama mentioned arugula during a speech to some Iowa farmers, he was criticized by the press as a "cultural elitist," though in truth the debate prompted the press to say that all the candidates were "elitist" in this respect. The Economist went so far as to brand Obama's Democratic supporters as "wine drinkers" and Hillary Clinton's as "beer drinkers," while emphasizing that the lifestyle of the latter bore little resemblance to those of her supposed constituency.

Obama's political opponents claimed that arugula was unknown in Iowa, but the fact check website Media Matters For America disputed this, listing an array of farms and markets in the state where it could be found: