What Fruits and Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them

Wild Carrot | Image: Genetic Literacy Program

For better or for worse, we humans seem to leave our mark on everything we touch. In the context of the article linked below, the topic is fruits and vegetables: their appearance before and after human domestication. Whether these changes in our produce come about by GMO, in which genes are spliced from other organisms, or specialized breeding plans by farmers (commonly referred to as selective breeding), the results can be significant.

Like the wild carrot pictured above, this article lists before and after pictures of fruits and vegetables that humans have altered to their tastes. Via The Presurfer

Many of our familiar crops have had beneficial traits bred into them from radiation-induced mutated strains. Among these are the Ruby Red grapefruit and the round Asian Pear.

About a decade ago, a virus was killing millions of cocoa trees in Ghana. Gamma-irradiated mutants were created, and a resistant variant was found that is now being used to replace the susceptible crop.

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