Here’s What Fruits And Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them…

Posted on by Chris The Story Reading Ape

By Tanya Lewis on Science Alert site:

Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: these familiar fruits and veggies didn’t always look and taste this way.

Genetically modified foods, or GMOs, inspire strong reactions nowadays, but humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favourite produce for millennia.

While GMOs may involve splicing genes from other organisms (such as bacteria) to give plants desired traits – like resistance to pests, selective breeding is a slower process whereby farmers select and grow crops with those traits over time.

From bananas to eggplant, here are some of the foods that looked totally different before humans first started growing them for food.

Wild watermelon

This 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi depicts a watermelon that looks strikingly different from modern melons, as Vox points out. A cross-section of the one in the painting, which was made between 1645 and 1672, appears to have swirly shapes embedded in six triangular pie-shaped pieces.

Modern watermelon

Over time, humans have bred watermelons to have a red, fleshy interior – which is actually the placenta – like the ones seen here. Some people think the watermelon in Stanchi’s painting may just be unripe or unwatered, but the black seeds in the painting suggest that it was, in fact, ripe.

See and find out more at:

What Fruits and Vegetables looked like

11 thoughts on “Here’s What Fruits And Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them…”

  1. Great post. I stumbled on an article about the origins of corn some time back but I didn’t know so many other fruits and vegetables were once very different too. Thanks. 🙂

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  3. Reblogged this on Retired? No one told me! and commented:
    For me, a very interesting post from Chris@thestoryreadingapeblog…Here on the farms some of the fruit is similar to the first fruits on this post not been commercially grown. The watermelon we are currently eating is not exactly the same as a commercially grown one and I have been having a conversation with my grandson as he pointed out the difference and thought it was bad?? I told him it was grown on his nan’s farm and they just come up every year so this post was interesting and another topic for conversation with him so thank you, Chris… Kids certainly know how to stretch ones grey matter…lol…A good share and timely for me….I can resume this conversation armed and ready..haha

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  5. I love this article..very interesting we have quite a few different varieties of banana here and one, in particular, has quite big, very hard black seeds and I steer clear as you could break your teeth on them..lol..But seem like they are closer to the original strain than the popular eating banana…Interesting post Chris……..

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