7 Fruits and Veggies That Used to Look a Whole Lot Different
19.06.2024 - 23:01
/ treehugger.com
You walk through the produce section of your supermarket and everything looks so familiar. But the fruits and vegetables you see bear no resemblance to their ancestors from thousands of years ago. Most of them don't taste the same either.
Credit our forefathers who wanted bigger, tastier, and more attractive food. We talk a lot about GMOs these days, but selective breeding has been around for a while—thousands of years even.
Here are seven fruits and vegetables as they look today and a peek at what they looked like many years ago.
Corn is everywhere, especially in the summertime. That doesn't mean we know exactly where it came from. Its biological beginnings have long been considered a mystery.
Nevertheless, some scientists eventually linked maize to a Mexican grass called teosinte that has skinny ears with just a few dozen kernels inside a hard casing.
George W. Beadle, a graduate student at Cornell University, ultimately found that maize and teosinte had similar chromosomes, and he also was able to get teosinte kernels to pop. Beadle concluded the two plants were closely related (and later went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work in genetics).
Another summer favorite, watermelon has been around for millennia. Archaeologists found watermelon seeds at a 5,000-year-old settlement in Libya. Paintings of watermelons (as well as actual watermelon seeds) have been discovered in Egyptian tombs built more than 4,000 years ago, including the tomb of King Tut.
Early watermelons likely didn't have the popular red flesh we know today. They were paler with less flesh and more seeds.
A 2011 study looked at the evolution of the popular, familiar yellow banana. It analyzed multidisciplinary findings from archaeology,