The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs.
goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
Exactly what I was thinking as I read the parent. Around here we have wild raspberries and grapes. They look so different I had to taste them to be sure and even then they taste different. The grapes are extremely acidic and taste awful (but make great wine :-)
Remember that by definition we only eat the edible fruits!!! Most plants bear some kind of fruit and most of them are inedible to humans.
i would consider fruits to be a nontrivial group. not saying they're a major part of everyone's diet necessarily, but they're not quite something to be brushed aside as not significant.
