We have been selectively breeding all kinds of crops and the fruits and vegetables we are used to now look nothing like the actual wild plants that they started as.
Can you guess this vegetable? The answer is in the end of the post!
So let's look at how fruits and vegetables looked like before we intervined through selective breeding.
Tomatoes
The original tomatoes looked more like berries with large seeds inside and Europeans were initially reluctant to taste them because they looked like some poisonous plants that they were used to avoiding.
Watermelons
Watermelons used to have a lot more seeds and a lot less tasty red flesh.
Bananas
Bananas used to be a lot shorter and their seeds were much larger and the fruit was full of them unlike the modern version that is all flesh with remnants of the seeds barely noticeable.
Eggplant
Eggplants were much smaller, lighter in color and almost unrecognizable.
Corn
Despite the fact that corn has been cultivated a very long time ago, it looked very different for quite some time.
Carrots
Carrots started as almost unassuming looking roots and for most of their history they where white, grey and dark red to dark violet. The orange mutation became popular because of the Dutch who fell in love with it when it first appeared because of their national association with the color orange.
...and the answer to our mystery...
There are at least 8 vegetables that we view as absolutely distinct ones in modern times that all stem from wild cabbage also known as Brassica oleracea. It's the original plant that gave rise to all kinds of cabbage (from white to red), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale and even more exotic ones like kohlrabi and gai lan.
Wow, very cool information you presented here. I never really thought about what we eat these days may have looked like in the past. With humans practicing plant husbandry for 10,000+ years, i guess i shouldn't be surprised.
I need to look at more of your posts but have you ever done one for some common animals we have altered? Heck, you can probably do a whole series on just dogs or cats we have changed over time. Anyway, fun article!
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Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I haven't talked about how animals have evolved around us and how we've selectively bred them so they would fit our needs. Dogs are a prime example of that and I might actually do a post on them and other domesticated animals in the future, thank you for the idea! :)
Have fun and all the best!
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Definitely, I am following you now as you have some interesting posts. Steemit is a fun platform and i am learning some awesome things here. Keep doing what you are doing!
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You too! Have fun here and I'll see you around ;)
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Cool post! I knew it was a brasacia and was leaning towards broccoli. Upvoted and resteemed
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Well, broccoli is one of the correct answers. Maybe I should have gone with the eggplant for the "mystery", would that have been easier or harder in your opinion?
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Probably harder for most people.
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super cool, we take so much for granted that we see in our world, without learning to perceive the history of things. new follower here, good luck, peace
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Thank you for your comment and I'm happy you found this info interesting! :)
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I found the watermelon then and now MOST surprising :O
This was certainly an eye-opening post!
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I'm glad to hear that :) Thank you for the comment. I found the watermelon thing surprising too. We don't actually have photos of the old version, the image in there is from a painting from the 17th century by Giovanni Stanchi.
Here's the whole thing:
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I see..well, it must be a rather accurate portrayal, since the pears and peaches/apples look rather normal :)
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It's very likely accurate. All the other fruits in the painting have undergone changes too, it just must have happened earlier.
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Perhaps..I try not to buy seedless watermelons already..always thought that was enough caution..apparently not lol
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Yep, you can safely go with seedless without a worry ;)
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very interesting-hardest I found was the carrot wow what a transformation! resteemed!
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I'm glad you found this interesting and thanks for the comment and resteeming!
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I enjoyed this very much. Nice post. I had no idea.
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Thanks a lot! I'm very glad to hear that!
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Hi! I thought it was sea kale. Great pics! The corn has really changed.. All yummy! :))
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They are all yummy now, but the originals were not only strange looking, some of them certainly didn't taste as good as they do now :)
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I guessed broccoli. Your picture resembles some of ours that bolted earlier in the season.
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You guessed right! :)
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Interesting post. There is also kale that belongs to the cabbage family. For me, some bananas develop small seeds near the center if they take too long to ripen, and the outer part of the banana is soft but as you cut through the middle there is resistance as the central part of the banana gets harder and not very nice to eat.
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Thank you for the comment!
Yep, kale is also part of the cabbage family and I actually included it in the post. It's in the upper right corner of the last image, but I guess I chose a bit of a strange picture for it ;)
I didn't know that about bananas, I guess that's because where I live all bananas are imported and thus all of them are underripe (if that word exists). What I know about most commercially available bananas around the world is not that they are all the exact same sort, but that they are all genetic clones coming from the exact same plant.
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I knew it was a wild cabbage, but the watermelon and the corn was a total surprise!
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A lot of them have changed dramatically and corn has started from a thin bean pod and changed into the big, orderly and easy to peal ears of corn we have today.
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And lots of them is unfortunately human-made.
I thought the corn would look about the same, just smaller, thinner...
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Why unfortunately? Those plants were not changed for the worse.
Yep, the corn looks very very different, the current shape is something totally new.
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Because in many cases they were changed genetically by a human. They do not look they way the nature made them.
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Pretty much all of them don't look the way nature made them, the question is why is that a bad thing. Are modern carrots worse than the root thingy in the picture? Why do you think changed by humans necessarily means worse?
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Well... my little brain tells me that is if something is genetically changed (GMO) to make it bigger or grow faster, more resistant to pests, diseases and so on, is not necessarily a good thing. It goes against nature. It is messing with the natural genetic code and that was made in a certain way for thousands of years for a reason.
Of course nature keeps changing and adapting too, but it is a natural process.
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When things change, it's neither necessarily good, nor necessarily bad. All of those plants in my post changed because of humans for the better, not for the worse. That's why it was not unfortunate that they changed with time because of us.
The idea that everything GMO is bad is unsubstantiated. Doesn't using a computer go against nature, too? Maybe the fact that we are using them is unfortunate too?
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ewkaw, I think you are mistaking selective breeding with GMO's...there is a huge difference and they are nothing alike. Selective breeding is taking the seeds from a plant that has qualities you are looking for and only replanting those, then from those plants, only taking the seeds from the plants that again had the qualities you are looking for, and it keeps going until you get the desired effect. The plants already had the genetic information and the qualities simply being brought forward. That is how there are so many dog breeds in the world - they were bred for specific qualities to show. The same with chicken breeds, bovine breeds, sheep breeds etc.
GMO on the other hand is the result of a laboratory process where genes from the DNA of one species are extracted and artificially forced into the genes of an unrelated plant or animal. In other words, mixing different species DNA together...bad. This can never occur in nature or through selective breeding.
You have every reason to be against GMO's, but there is nothing wrong with selective breeding.
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I agree with you.
In the conversation I was focusing on GMO as human made, not selective breeding. Maybe I wasn't clear about what I meant by Human made.
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Oh, sorry I didn't realize.
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You're a brilliant man! I like your posts!
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Thank you for the kind words! :)
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