What Fruits and Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them

There&#x27;s also an interesting comparison to Australian &quot;bush tucker&quot; (native foods), which have been eaten by Aboriginals for thousands of years but <i>not</i> systematically cultivated and bred:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bush_tucker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bush_tucker</a><p>Surprise surprise, more or less all bush fruit are small, have large seeds&#x2F;stones, and taste inoffensive but rarely delicious. I wonder what a bush plum or lilly-pilly would look &amp; taste like after 4,000 years of systematic breeding?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carissa_spinarum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carissa_spinarum</a> (bonus: poisonous when unripe)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Syzygium_smithii" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Syzygium_smithii</a>

Very interesting article that shows how far we&#x27;ve come. But I was completely turned off by the undertone of &quot;GMO is OK, we&#x27;ve been doing it forever&quot;. Actual gene editing has so much more potential, not just for beneficial changes but for inadvertent catastrophes. What happens when GMO creates a mistake on the order of Thalidomide?

The original domesticated carrots were purple, and these remain the default carrot in parts of the world (eg. much of northern India).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrot#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrot#History</a>

The watermelon example is incorrect. That started as a posting on social media and shortly after there were corrections by botanists and agricultural experts. The watermelon in the painting is an example of a pathology that still occurs in modern watermelon.

I find these wild fruits and vegetables fascinating. Does anyone know where you could find&#x2F;buy&#x2F;grow these to taste them, out of curiosity?

teosinte, the ancestor of maize, still grows in Mexico and is occasionally harvested by indigenous peoples. There was some very nice work done by Beadle (&quot;one gene, one enzyme&quot;) and Mcclintock (&quot;jumping genes&quot;) to uncover the historical relationship and it&#x27;s quite impressive to see what 10K years of selective breeding can do.

It’s good that the article includes images of the modern counterparts, you know, for Gen Z. (joke)

Long term there should be no difference between traditional breeding and GMO outcomes. (traditional just operates at the maximum pace and incremental change nature allows)<p>GMO is a issue only where turning a short term profit overrides giving the mutation time for natural attrition to weed out any potential issues.<p>The thing is, both can lead to bad outcomes: susceptibility to disease and inability to breed from seed are common issues as a result of selective breeding.