How Fruits & Vegetables Evolved Over Centuries of Agriculture
- 5 years ago
Agribusiness is a genuinely late innovation, just around 10,000 years of age. Since horticulture started, many generations of agriculturists have falsely reproduced harvests to choose for more attractive characteristics, similar to size and taste. Obviously, your most loved foods grown from the ground have changed radically throughout the hundreds of years. The world is in a constant state of flux. Things are changing every second of every day, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and this is a natural part of life. So it should come as no surprise that much of the food we eat today has changed as well, and bears little resemblance to its distant forebears. There are many reasons for this, including evolution and plant/animal interactions within ecosystems, changes in farming technology and methods — GMOs are one unfortunate example of this — and plant hybridization, which is in itself an agricultural technology.
Once we began growing these particular fruits and vegetables en masse to meet the demands of consumers, they started to change. Take a look at what fruits and vegetables used to look like, before we domesticated them.
Watermelon
The image above is a watermelon painted by Giovanni Stanchi in the 17th century. James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Vox, “It’s fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago.” He uses the Stanchi painting to teach his classes about the history of crop breeding. Some claim that the watermelon is just unripe or under-watered, but the presence of black seeds in the fruit indicates that it was ripe.
Today we have bred watermelons to be much smaller, with a white lining and bright red flesh, which is actually the watermelon’s placenta. Before domestication, the placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene necessary to give it that red colour. We have also created seedless varieties of watermelon in recent years, which may well become the standard.
Banana
The first bananas are thought to have been cultivated about 10,000 years ago in what is now known as Papua New Guinea. Portuguese colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries established banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and Western Africa. North Americans soon began consuming bananas on a small scale; it was only until the 1880s that it became more widespread.
Today our hybrid bananas come from two wild varieties, Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana, which had large, hard seeds, like the ones in this photo. The modern banana has much smaller seeds, contains more nutrients, and, it has been conjectured, tastes much better.
Music: Star of the Conqueror by Dhruva Aliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/the-wolf-and-the-river
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/5XiFCr9iBKE6Cupltgnlet
Once we began growing these particular fruits and vegetables en masse to meet the demands of consumers, they started to change. Take a look at what fruits and vegetables used to look like, before we domesticated them.
Watermelon
The image above is a watermelon painted by Giovanni Stanchi in the 17th century. James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Vox, “It’s fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago.” He uses the Stanchi painting to teach his classes about the history of crop breeding. Some claim that the watermelon is just unripe or under-watered, but the presence of black seeds in the fruit indicates that it was ripe.
Today we have bred watermelons to be much smaller, with a white lining and bright red flesh, which is actually the watermelon’s placenta. Before domestication, the placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene necessary to give it that red colour. We have also created seedless varieties of watermelon in recent years, which may well become the standard.
Banana
The first bananas are thought to have been cultivated about 10,000 years ago in what is now known as Papua New Guinea. Portuguese colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries established banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and Western Africa. North Americans soon began consuming bananas on a small scale; it was only until the 1880s that it became more widespread.
Today our hybrid bananas come from two wild varieties, Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana, which had large, hard seeds, like the ones in this photo. The modern banana has much smaller seeds, contains more nutrients, and, it has been conjectured, tastes much better.
Music: Star of the Conqueror by Dhruva Aliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/the-wolf-and-the-river
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/5XiFCr9iBKE6Cupltgnlet