Foods before and after we domesticated them

[Tab]

[valerief]

1. Well, modern corn has been genetically altered to include Round-Up in it.

I don't think you can breed corn to do that.

[Major Nikon]

2. You are probably thinking of Bt

Round-up is not inherent to the plants, they are just modified to resist it. Some food crops have been modified to include the pesticide Bt, but this is certainly not outside the realm of what occurs naturally as most plants have some sort of pesticides inherent to them or they wouldn't have survived. In fact, most of the pesticide load you ingest from food crops are inherent to the plants regardless of whether they were modified by gene splicing or not.

There are all sorts of ways to modify plants besides gene splicing, including bombarding seeds with ionizing radiation and various chemicals to produce completely random mutations which has been done for the last 100 years or so. If you've ever eaten a Ruby Red grapefruit or one of the varietals adapted from it, you've sampled the "fruits" of that technology.

[valerief]

3. Bt corn *is* Round-Up Ready corn.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/bt-corn_b_2442072.html

[Major Nikon]

4. There are numerous varietals

Some have both Bt inherent and Round-Up read traits, some have those individually. Regardless, "Round-Up Ready" means the plants are resistant to the effects of Round-Up, not that they have Round-Up in them. Bt varietals means the plants have Bt in them.

Mercola is a first rate quack, BTW. He's run afoul of the FDA numerous times for promoting various quackery. He's a right wing anti-abortionist, a nutjob conspiracy theorist, AIDS-denier, among lots of other things. The fact that HuffPo gives him a soapbox speaks volumes about that site.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola


He also neglects to mention that Bt is not only perfectly safe, but quite commonly used by the Organic industry and is NOP approved.
http://lee.ifas.ufl.edu/AgNatRes/Pubs/'Pesticides'_for_organic_farms.pdf

[jmowreader]

28. You're taking the word of America's Worst Quack as gospel?

Joseph Mercola wrote that article. If that sorry bastard walked into my shop dripping wet and claimed it was raining, I'd go outside and look up just to make sure. Mercola at least USED to be persona non grata at DU, and he still should be.

Bt is an insecticide. Roundup is a herbicide, and Roundup Ready (which, incidentally, is not necessarily a manmade trait; it turns out there's a naturally-occurring glyphosate-resistant coca plant) is a trait that keeps the plant from dying if it's sprayed with it.

[valerief]

30. No, Huffpo.

[HuckleB]

35. Mercola is a scam artist.

[jeff47]

5. They're wrong on seedless watermelon.

The plant won't develop a fruit unless it is pollinated. So you can't block pollination to create a seedless watermelon.

Instead, a regular watermelon is treated with the mutagen colchicine. This causes the watermelon to make another copy of all of its genes (for a total of 4 copies). Then that watermelon is bred with a "regular" watermelon that has 2 copies of its genes.

The resulting child has 3 copies of its genes. The odd number of genes screws up meiosis, so it can't produce seeds.

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/newsletters/hortupdate/hortupdate_archives/2000/may00/h5may00.html

[Major Nikon]

7. I've yet to sample a seedless watermelon that was worth a damn

I'll take a seeded one any day of the week, but they are getting increasingly hard to find outside of farmer's markets

[emmadoggy]

8. I completely agree with you!

Today's watermelons just don't live up to my memories of watermelons we had when I was a kid. And we had watermelon quite often during the summer in those days. We would eat multiple, huge slices! We'd get the great big, oblong melons and put them in our milking cooler to get them really cold. We'd be a sticky, slurpy mess as we chowed down on it, and yeah, the seeds were a pain - but it was always worth the trouble!

[Tab]

12. Absolutely, and it wasn't that long ago

Stores started to switch to "seedless" because humans (at least Americans) couldn't be brought to handle spitting out watermelon seeds anymore (which is half the fun) but the seedless have, at best, the flavor of half a watermelon. I don't even give a damn about watermelon half the time now - it's nothing like what I had growing up. Please give me seeds.

FYI, I had a watermelon patch (which you can get inadvertently by just tossing out your watermelon) but we also had a large groundhog that ultimately ate it. But who knows, maybe that proves the popularity of the seeded kind.

[emmadoggy]

23. And is it just me,

or do the new ones turn to mush in no time at all, too?

[dixiegrrrrl]

17. One of blessings of living in the rural South....

6 weeks of great local watermelon eating.
There are several varieties down here grown locally, one is Jubilee, a grayish green with light stripes.
they come in huge sizes, 20# or more, for about 6.00, go down to 3.00 sometimes late in season.
We buy them about twice a week, cut them in half and share with neighbors, they are too large to stick in fridge other wise.

[Tab]

18. Mrs. Dixie, can you ship some up?

I would like a real watermelon again.

[dixiegrrrrl]

20. It will kill you to hear

what the owner of the local produce store told me last summer.
He said farmers would come by with a pickup load of watermelons and happily take 50.00 for the whole load.
Which he would then sell for 6.00 apiece.

We have the famous Chilton peaches here, grown 3 counties north of me, that will make you think you are in heaven.
but they do not ship well at all, so most of them are sold in the state for one small glorious season.

And Vidalia onions from Geargia..sweet enough to eat raw....same story.

real tomatoes....I grow them every year, they are too easy to not grow.

tis easy to wait a whole year for a season of real food, which tastes great because of the wait.

[Tab]

21. It's only recently

(I mean relatively - from the 70s on) that we started getting used to fruit year round, tasteless though it might be. Growing up, we had watermelons in the summer, blueberries in the fall, other things in the spring, and you just cooked seasonally. Now we have access to that stuff all the time, but the taste has disappeared. Don't even ask me to eat a "Red Delicious" apple - the former poster child for apples. And don't even get me started on strawberries. Strawberries are picked green, I think treated with some kind of acceleration gas, and shipped from wherever.

[Retrograde]

32. I've heard of Chilton peaches, but never had them

Mr. Retrograde's mother's family is from Chilton county, but I've never been there in peach season. When I met him, he wouldn't eat peaches because folk wisdom said they caused pellagra. Turns out that during the Great Depression people there often ate nothing but peaches, since it was all they had: naturally that led to vitamin deficiencies.

[elljay]

26. Scuppernongs!

Lived in Atlanta for a few years and sure miss the native Scuppernong and Muscadine grapes. Not sure they can grow out here in California. Sigh...

[left-of-center2012]

6. Very interesting

Thanks for sharing

[nikto]

9. This makes me wonder ...

What were twinkies like, in their original form?

[nikto]

10. ...

Ancient twinkies:


Modern twinkies:

[Tab]

11. Are they not?

I'm not convinced they can evolve.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. Imagine we land on a planet where the inhabitants unfortunately look and taste like potato chips....

They're running away in terror because we never eat just one.

[Tab]

15. That's just groupthink

[Lunabell]

14. So cool

Thank you for sharing.

[noamnety]

16. pawpaws make so much more sense suddenly!

I've heard them called the Michigan banana, and I always thought that was strange. I get it now!

[img][/img]

I should have known this. I have pawpaw trees in my yard.

[Tab]

19. I thought Rick Snyder was the Michigan banana

How do pawpaws taste? Never had one.

[noamnety]

22. lol!

Pawpaws taste almost like a banana but with a hint of tangy flavor, like a mango.

[SheilaT]

24. While there's a lot to like about

things like modern corn and carrots, I've given up buying watermelon because they have no flavor any more. They should be sweet. Very sweet. The last few times I've bought one there's simply no flavor. Same with most tomatoes in the supermarket. And if I walk by a display of peaches in the store I should be bowled over the the wonderful smell of peaches. But I'm not. And it's been years since I've had one that wasn't mealy in texture. Sigh.

[elljay]

25. Fruit Hobbyists

If you are interested in great tasting fruit, join California Rare Fruit Growers or North American Fruit Explorers. My CRFG chapter meetings always have tastings of members' fruits, which are often exotic and always the best varieties. We are the fruit snobs who have dozens of antique apple varieties grafted onto a single tree and are always happy to share with our friends. Once you have tasted some of the varieties that are not available in stores, you can never go back! I'm waiting for my delivery of European Plum trees- the best!!!

[SheilaT]

29. Can I join without raising fruit myself?

I am going to need to do some vegetable growing in my back yard. I'm in the process of getting my yard properly landscaped, and the man doing it grows serious vegetables in his own back yard, two houses down from mine. He got a start this past summer, and isn't doing anything over the winter, understandably enough. I think I'll let him know I want an area at least for tomatoes.

[elljay]

31. Of Course

Look the groups up online. There are no membership requirements other than dues.

[burrowowl]

27. K&R!!!!!!

[Retrograde]

33. Occasionally you find a throwback

I once found a seed in a commercial banana. And modern watermelons sometimes show that spirally pattern.

Peppers and tomatoes are other vegetables that humans have improved for their own convenience: the wild variety of the former were small, upright fruits that ripened to a bright red, the better to attract birds who would spread the seeds. People changed them into the big, pendulous peppers we see today.

[aswanson]

34. Wow!!

Wow! That is so interesting!