Romanesco Broccoli, eat your veg doing maths!

It’s delicious! And you could say… it’s mathematical!
Romanesco is an ancestor of broccoli and cauliflower. The edible flower bud is indigenous to Italy. It is part of the cruciferous family and to me it is the most charming and beautiful vegetable I’ve ever seen.
This “green star” of our kitchen is so fascinating, not just for its sweet and nutty flavour – so different from anything else, good as a side dish, excellent with pasta – but because the little pyramid flower buds are a perfect example of the mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci number. Fibonacci was a medieval Italian mathematician from Pisa and his sequence is a set of numbers that starts with a one or a zero, followed by a one, before proceeding based on the rule that each number (called a Fibonacci number) is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers. This keeps going over and over again.
It is natural geometry that repeats itself “ad infinitum”. The romanesco broccoli is an approximate fractal as it can’t go on forever, but if they can be counted, the number of the florets are always a Fibonacci number. The whole “broccolo” is made up of smaller florets that mimic the shape of the larger one, and each of these smaller florets is made up of even smaller, similar heads. It is a wonder of nature!
Next time you’re eating a Romanesco broccoli, think how incredibly mathematical it is and that numbers are part of our everyday life, even in a such an apparently simple thing like a vegetable! And oh …I almost forgot is rich in vitamin C!