
What Fruits and Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them - shawndumas
https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domestication-photos-genetically-modified-food-natural
======
9nGQluzmnq3M
There's also an interesting comparison to Australian "bush tucker" (native
foods), which have been eaten by Aboriginals for thousands of years but _not_
systematically cultivated and bred:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker)

Surprise surprise, more or less all bush fruit are small, have large
seeds/stones, and taste inoffensive but rarely delicious. I wonder what a bush
plum or lilly-pilly would look & taste like after 4,000 years of systematic
breeding?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_spinarum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_spinarum)
(bonus: poisonous when unripe)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygium_smithii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygium_smithii)

------
mark-r
Very interesting article that shows how far we've come. But I was completely
turned off by the undertone of "GMO is OK, we've been doing it forever".
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?

~~~
stickfigure
Old school selective breeding is full of consequential mistakes too. See
"Africanized killer bees".

If anything, gene editing is much more predictable than randomly mashing
together the genes of select specimens.

~~~
ricardobeat
You might be overestimating our gene-editing abilities - our current knowledge
is, in rough terms, a bunch of guesses where we only discover other roles a
gene has years later. It’s anything but predictable.

~~~
acomjean
We’re actually getting pretty good at gene editing at this point. Predicting
what the consequence of those edits is another story. (Although I think that’s
what you were getting at).

Plant genes are odd.

From and old article by Michael Polan:

“When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard
geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ''From an
intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right,'' he said. ''But it's a
bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and
get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as
many mistakes as an organism does'' \-- in interpreting its DNA, he meant --
''I'd throw it out.''

I asked him for a better metaphor. ''An ecosystem,'' he offered. ''You can
always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing
what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the
environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism
develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock
after another.''”

[https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-
in-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-
garden.html)

~~~
russh
''An ecosystem,''

Thats a brilliant metaphor.

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
The original domesticated carrots were purple, and these remain the default
carrot in parts of the world (eg. much of northern India).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#History)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
In northern Eurasia, the most common color for carrots used to be yellow (like
some parsnip varieties today), and the local-language name for them still
sometimes contains the word "yellow" even though today people buy the same
orange carrots as elsewhere.

------
gyuserbti
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.

------
Xcelerate
I find these wild fruits and vegetables fascinating. Does anyone know where
you could find/buy/grow these to taste them, out of curiosity?

~~~
wil421
Yes, rareseeds.com is a great place for heirloom seeds and funky seeds/plants
you can’t find elsewhere. Most of their stuff has been “tamed” but they will
mention if it’s not ready for farming type cultivation.

They have an ancient watermelon that’s been breed to taste good. I’m going to
start growing Paw Paws this year or next.

------
dekhn
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
("one gene, one enzyme") and Mcclintock ("jumping genes") to uncover the
historical relationship and it's quite impressive to see what 10K years of
selective breeding can do.

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

~~~
mark-r
Enjoy those modern bananas while you can, they'll be extinct soon enough.

~~~
petre
That story has been running for at least ten years, yet I can still buy
Cavendish bananas at almost any grocery.

~~~
mark-r
As I said, enjoy them while you can. The parts of the world where they can be
grown has been steadily shrinking. I think just last week I saw a story where
the deadly fungus had been found in South America.

------
dwd
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)

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.

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.

~~~
yesenadam
>traditional just operates at the maximum pace and incremental change nature
allows

..uh and using genes from the same species! As opposed to using any genes from
any species at all. I'm not sure how people can present GM as if it's the same
thing, just a bit faster. Or how you can talk as if lack of fertility is the
main problem people have, or the only problem people could possibly have, with
GMO.

~~~
dwd
The article was about how we have changed food plants mostly via selective
breeding (and grafting), so my point on fertility was in regard to the crop.
Cavendish bananas are a good example of selective breeding gone wrong, and
eliminating seeds in citrus fruits is also problematic.

GMO from a human health point of view is entirely different issue, and I agree
that it is poorly understood as far as long term effects. They also need to do
better to quarantine the GMO from the possibility of cross-breeding before
long term studies are completed.

At the same time climate change is an issue which is where GMO could have
value such as making some crops more resistant to drought or frost as our
weather patterns become more variable and bioregions shift. While this may
require venturing outside of a genus which is the limit of where you can go
with breeding/grafting you're not going to be venturing too far. Personally I
do disagree with GMO programs such as herbicide resistance as that's something
else again.

Maybe GMO should be something left to Government approval and funding where
short-term profit making doesn't play into how soon a new plant variety is
released?

And for better transparency we treat each GMO not as a variety but as a new
breed with a new name?

~~~
yesenadam
Thank for this very generous response, on an issue about which I know little.

~~~
dwd
I was going to post a couple of old articles as background to my various dot
points, and found this from last week which covers most of the debate and
quite a bit more. Also has up-to-date information on where Government
regulation is at. Quite a good article.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-
warmin...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/food-
how-altered/)

Some background on biotech in general.

[http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/agricultural_bio...](http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/agricultural_biotechnology/download/Agricultural_Biotechnology.pdf)

