Peas may have plagued children since the first pea stew was served, but this week we're celebrating an anniversary of that conflicted vegetable relationship.

Like broccoli and spinach, peas are green, and parents love them.

That's enough for kids to push them around on their plates for hours.

Psychologists believe that this hatred of vegetables does not necessarily serve the power game with the parents.

Rather, for toddlers, food is always a form of discovery – sometimes they are more in the mood to explore and sometimes less.

Johanna Kuroczik

Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Older children despair of Pisum sativum

for other reasons

- namely when Gregor Johann Mendel's theory of heredity is on the curriculum in biology class.

That's what we're thinking about this week, even though it's summer vacation in many places and the tables remain empty, because on July 20th we celebrate the 200th birthday of the Augustinian monk who is praised as the father of genetics.

To find out how traits are inherited, he planted around 28,000 garden pea plants over a period of seven years.

This is self-pollinating, Mendel transferred the pollen with an ink brush.

Mendel's rules for inheritance emerge from his crossing experiments in the monastery garden.

If you crossed homozygous plants that produced yellow seeds with their green counterparts, the first daughter generation produced only yellow seeds.

If these apparently identical plants were crossed again, the following generation would split into green and yellow seeds in a certain ratio – according to Mendel's second rule.

"My time will come"

It is now known that all genes are inherited in pairs - one inherited from the mother and one from the father.

They can be dominant or recessive, i.e. weaker.

This does not only apply to the color of the seeds of peas.

An example is eye color: parents with brown eyes can still have a blue-eyed child even though the blue-eyed genes are recessive if both the mother and father carry a recessive trait for the azure iris.

In school this was demonstrated more vividly - with many arrows between the generations and capital and small letters for the recessive or dominant traits.

Mendel was also a natural history teacher at a high school in Brünn or Brno in what is now the Czech Republic.

In the school building he also gave the legendary lecture "Experiments on Plant Hybrids".

On a cold February evening in 1865, all sorts of prominent scientists gathered there to listen to him, but they could not follow him.

A record of the evening shows that no question was asked at the end.

His “attempts” died away, and the printed version was hardly noticed.

The well-known botanist Carl Wilhelm von Nageli received a copy by post at the University of Munich, but he is said to have understood "only Bahnhof", as the biologist Stefano Mancuso puts it in his book about Mendel, among others, "Aus Liebe zu den Pflanzen".

As a Van Gogh of biology, he only gained fame posthumously when three researchers referred to his work at the beginning of the 20th century.

But Mendel never lost hope. He is said to have said to a friend: "My time will come." Parents and teachers can take an example from this patient optimism.

During the vegetable wars at the dining table, it is advised not to punish, but to show enthusiasm for the pea.

This is also good advice for biology teachers - Mendel himself probably thought so because he was a popular teacher.

Hundreds of former students attended his funeral in January 1884.