Fruits and vegetables have given an immense contribution to making our life healthy and brimming our body with required nutrition. From berry to bottle gourd, every other fruit and vegetable is filled with vitamins and minerals that are essential for our body. There are numerous varieties of fruits and vegetables that are different from one another, whether in taste, color, or size. There’s no doubt in asserting that these vegetables and fruits undergo genetic modifications in order to make them potent enough to supply more nutrition. But, have you ever thought about how did your favorite vegetables and fruits look like before these modifications and mutations?
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SSSniperWolf on Food That Used To look Different
SSSniperWolf is a trending YouTube channel that is popular for its funny and DIY videos. Lia, the owner of the channel, has made plenty of videos on things she likes and grabbed a pretty good chain of followers. Her YouTube channel has 17.1 million subscribers, and that’s a handsome number. Recently, Lia posted a video on her channel, which showed different fruits and vegetables that used to look different earlier.
Over the years, fruits and vegetables have gone through several mutations that made them look different from what they look today. Let’s delve into such fruits and vegetables and compare their before and after avatar.
Banana
According to sources, bananas were cultivated around 7000-10000 years ago in Guinea and parts of Southeast Asia. The wild variant of bananas was nothing like they look today. They had two main variants; Musa Acuminata and Musa balbisiana, both had large and hard seeds that made banana quite hard to eat compared to the ease of eating a banana today. (Zolpidem) Hybrid bananas, on the other hand, are delicious, soft, and seedless. It comes in a graspable shape and ready to use without washing, and you just need to peel off its skin. Compared to its ancestors, modern banana are much more loaded with nutrients.
There are no witnesses of old watermelon other than a 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi whereon, the delicious food looked strangely different than it looks today. The painting was made somewhere between 1645-1672 that depicted watermelon as six triangular pie-shaped pieces with embedded black seeds on it. The watermelon in painting was not as juicy as it is today. Over time, watermelon has transformed into juicy, flavoursome, and red fruit. People believe that the watermelon showed in the painting must have been unripe, but the black seeds clearly state that they perfectly ripen.
Eggplant
Since this dark vegetable has been introduced to mankind, it has witnessed some serious transformations, whether in its shape, size, or colour. Eggplants already come in a wide range of colours and shapes, including white, azure, purple, and yellow. The early eggplants were cultivated in China when they used to have spines at the place of today’s stems. Over the years, eggplant spines got replaced by stems, and eggplant was no longer a horrible looking vegetable, which was hard to pluck from the farmland.
Carrot
In the 10th century, Persians used to cultivate early carrots. The vibrant orange carrots were originally purple or white in colour. They were thin and forked root. Gradually, with the changing environment, carrot lost it’s purple pigment and turned yellow. Farmers modified carrots into today’s thin white rooted carrots that are majorly orange or reddish in color. Carrots are a great source of vitamin and come under annual winter crops. There are still some farmlands in the world that witness the production of carrots with purple pigmentation, and farmers consider it as a defect or malnutrition and throw them away.
Corn
Over the years, corns have been bred into different categories according to regions. North American sweet corn was the most popular breeding of corn that was made from the teosinte plant. The first corn that was domesticated in 7000 BC, originally looked like a raw potato. The early corn used to be dry and had no resemblance to what it looks today. Today, corns are much easier to cultivate than it used to be 7000 years ago. Corn today has 6.6% sugar that makes it even more delicious than its ancestors. The changes in the corn started to happen around the 15th century when farmers adopted improvised methods to cultivate corn.
Unlike the alluringly delicious fruit, it is today; peaches used to be tiny cherry-like fruits with no pulp or flesh at all. Domesticated around 4000 BC in China, peaches had an earthy and salty taste. It also stated that early peaches actually tasted like lentils. Peaches were not a popular fruit back in those days, people used to throw them away, or kids used them to play, but no one considered them into the category of fruits. After thousands of years, peaches were reborn into a juicier and sweeter version of fruits that is widely popular across the world. The colour peaches have today is also immensely different from what it used to be.
While relishing their favourite fruit or vegetable, no one would have ever thought they could look or taste different. With genetic modification, these vegetables and fruits have been transformed into their current acceptable version. From bananas to eggplants, every fruit and vegetable that is grown on earth has been transformed from its previous form. Next time when you take a slice of watermelon or cob of corn, remember the mutations and transformations it has gone through and be grateful that you are eating the much tastier and possibly healthier version of it.
