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We’re accustomed to seeing fruits and vegetables as natural, organic, and wholesome. They are naturally occurring foods, so they are obviously healthy, right? Well, not quite. Over millennia, humans have repeatedly intervened and "domesticated" several plants, fruits, and vegetables, resulting in today's "healthy, natural" foods. They are grown naturally these days, but they have been—and there’s no other way to say this—engineered by humans since before recorded history. We're sharing information here that only professional food historians are privy to, so check out the list of foods that have been made edible by human intervention (invention?):
1) Bananas:
Bananas are considered tropical. The most popular variety today is the Robusta, also called the Cavendish banana. And that name holds a clue. The most popular banana today, which accounts for over 40 percent of global production, comes from the dreary climes of England. A 19th-century British gardener, Joseph Paxton, noted that bananas until then looked more like the commonly occurring green plantains. They had more in common with potatoes than the soft, sweet fruit we know today. Less than impressed by the old-school banana, Paxton set about experimenting with and tweaking the banana in the greenhouse owned by the Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish. He finally hit paydirt in 1835, producing 100 bananas of the variety we now use to snack in the evenings. Paxton named the banana after the duke who supported his research, and he was awarded a medal at the 1835 Royal Horticultural Society show. By the 1950s, cavendish bananas were becoming the most popular variety around the world. So there you have it: if not for the experiments of an industrious British gardener, we’d likely not have bananas as a common food today.
2) Peaches:
Peaches are old. Fossils from over 2.5 million years ago bear the same outer shell or skin as modern-day peaches. The first cultivation of peaches was believed to have occurred in the Neolithic era (between 10,000 BCE and 2,200 BCE) in the region we know as Iran. Some believe peaches were introduced to Greece by Alexander the Great after his time spent dismantling the Persian Empire. The people of ancient Rome were growing peaches in the 1st century CE. More research in recent times indicates that peach cultivation may have actually begun around 3,000 BCE, or even as far back as 6,000 BCE, in eastern China, specifically in today’s Zhejiang province. By the 17th century, it had become an expensive treat in England and France. It was said that Queen Victoria's favorite treat was a fresh peach after dinner.
The modern avatar of peaches is the result of the work of horticulturists over the centuries. Originally, peaches were smaller, sour to taste, and had "stones" that occupied 35 percent of the space in that small fruit. Ever since humans realized they wanted to have more fruit in their fruit, they worked on developing varieties that had more, well, fruit. Today’s peach pit occupies only 10 percent of the fruit.
3) Strawberries:
Strawberries were originally, you guessed it, small and sour. They were cute and used as decorative fruit, like potpourri that you could eat. By the 14th century, French farmers saw an opportunity to do something about the size of this comically small fruit. They cultivated the fruit in a manner that made them sweeter, but the size did not change. In the 18th century, a French spy by the name of Amedee-Francois Frezier was sent on a sailing trip through some very unsafe, pirate-infested seas near the Americas by Louis XIV, the king of France. The French name for strawberry is fraise. Frezier was descended from Julius de Berry, who was knighted by the French king for introducing strawberries to French royalty. Talk about destiny.
Frezier arrived in Chile and discovered that the land he was hiding in produced much larger strawberries. They were also tastier. When he finally made his way back home, he took three strawberry plants with him. He crossed the Chilean berry plant with the French variety, but they bore no fruit. Some decades later, another French horticulturist, Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, showed Louis XV a bowl of Chilean strawberries. The king became an instant fan of the new variety of strawberries and ordered that they be planted in the palace gardens. Duchesne combined the Chilean strawberry with the newly imported Virginia strawberry, giving us the modern strawberry we now see everywhere.
4) Watermelon:
The large, green watermelons we’ve all grown up with—large, pink pulp bounded by a thin strip of white, hard shell, or rind, that we hate tasting—are a modern invention. For most of human history, watermelons were mostly seeds with a white rind throughout the inside of the fruit. The tasty part we love today was actually a lot smaller. Therefore, watermelons weren’t considered serious food until a few centuries ago and were thought of as portable water units that could be used to transport a lot of water through the desert, not unlike cacti.
5,000-year-old watermelon seeds were found in what is now Libya, and some older remains were also found near the Dead Sea. Watermelons were already being cultivated in India in the 7th century CE and reached China in the 10th century. They had a lot of seeds, so they reproduced quickly. But they were smaller than today’s melons and tasted less sweet. European farmers were growing watermelons by the 17th century and experimenting with the fruit. They selectively bred fruits with fewer seeds and more of the juicy pulp. And that’s how we got today’s watermelon.
5) Apples:
If not for human intervention, no two apples would ever be the same. That’s not good for keeping the doctor away, so it is a relief that we did. Much like the human fingerprint, each apple seed is unique. No one is like the other. If you planted two seeds from two apples that came from the same tree, you’d get different types of apples. So, orchardists grafted the qualities they wanted their apples to have into the rootstock trees (a rootstock is a stem with a well-developed root system; a bud from another plant is grafted onto this stem). By 2022, there were over 7000 unique types of apples due to such selective breeding.
