Discussion When does fruits and veggies become dangous?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,201
12,029
126
www.anyf.ca
Look up wild watermelons. Taste a wild strawberry. White rice is a staple food for billions of people and yet it didn't exist in nature. Understand that no form of corn exists in nature (and never did) yet it is sweet enough that we use it as a replacement for cane sugar in much of North America. Bananas were very different before we started frankensteining them too. Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage we're all the same plant in nature but we somehow cultivated it into these extreme variations that we consider different vegetables. Our zucchini, squash, and pumpkins are all crazy hybrids. You think green beans were like that before we got our hands on them? Tomatoes? Avocados were supposed to go extinct with the dinos and now we splice clones onto other root stock so that they don't die in places they otherwise can't be grown.

Point is, none of it is "natural" even if it fits the legal definition. Also, when you think about it, just about everything we consider a vegetable is actually a fruit and has way more sugar than most real veggies. Bean pods, corn, tomatoes, squash, etc. Avoiding it to "stay healthy" pretty much means starving to death these days.

That's pretty crazy. Is there way to get seeds to plant your own natural versions, or did humanity essentially extinct all of that? I could see this seriously be a problem if we are literally engineering food and letting the natural versions die off and go extinct. This is one of those things where in 30 years from now they'll discover all sorts of issues that it caused that we did not know about today.
 
  • Like
Reactions: gill77

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
57,364
7,516
126
That's pretty crazy. Is there way to get seeds to plant your own natural versions, or did humanity essentially extinct all of that? I could see this seriously be a problem if we are literally engineering food and letting the natural versions die off and go extinct. This is one of those things where in 30 years from now they'll discover all sorts of issues that it caused that we did not know about today.
It's not all doom and gloom. It's just the way things are, and they tend to make things better. Corn for instance was just a grass with bigger than average kernels, but not much to it. Selective breeding over hundreds/thousands of years created something worth eating. The downside is monocultures of one particular breed that get sold for food. It leaves the supply chain vulnerable to catastrophe(see the banana).
 

JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
3,318
126
Have fun on the Internet!

* cough two letters
I do have fun!! I would hope that derailing a thread due to a mispelled word is not your standard operating procedure....after all it is the internet my gosh...it is not a term paper for a graduate degree....
 

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
856
126
It's not all doom and gloom. It's just the way things are, and they tend to make things better. Corn for instance was just a grass with bigger than average kernels, but not much to it. Selective breeding over hundreds/thousands of years created something worth eating. The downside is monocultures of one particular breed that get sold for food. It leaves the supply chain vulnerable to catastrophe(see the banana).
Well, the Teosinte plant had zero agricultural significance and still had to be crossed with another plant that had no significance to create that first very-unproductive corn ancestor that ancient civilizations started cultivating and hybridizing into the multi-colored corn Old World explorers first encountered from Native Americans. Since neither plant had any agricultural value prior to this and there seemed to be no way to expect the result they got and it couldn't happen naturally, there are even conspiracies about it involving alien contact with the Mayans, Incans and Aztecs in order to explain it. Yeah, total BS, but it still goes to show how unnatural it is.

Despite being self-pollinating, Corn can't germinate without mankind and rots inside the husk. If we disappeared tomorrow, living corn would also disappear from the face of the Earth within a season. No such thing as wild corn and never was. It's a staple food now, like potatoes and rice, despite being totally unnatural. So much sugar and starch, of course, since that's what we humans want from it. Plants had no reason to develop that far naturally.
 

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
94,690
14,936
126
Look up wild watermelons. Taste a wild strawberry. White rice is a staple food for billions of people and yet it didn't exist in nature. Understand that no form of corn exists in nature (and never did) yet it is sweet enough that we use it as a replacement for cane sugar in much of North America. Bananas were very different before we started frankensteining them too. Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage we're all the same plant in nature but we somehow cultivated it into these extreme variations that we consider different vegetables. Our zucchini, squash, and pumpkins are all crazy hybrids. You think green beans were like that before we got our hands on them? Tomatoes? Avocados were supposed to go extinct with the dinos and now we splice clones onto other root stock so that they don't die in places they otherwise can't be grown.

Point is, none of it is "natural" even if it fits the legal definition. Also, when you think about it, just about everything we consider a vegetable is actually a fruit and has way more sugar than most real veggies. Bean pods, corn, tomatoes, squash, etc. Avoiding it to "stay healthy" pretty much means starving to death these days.



Whut? You mean the Náhuatil genetically engineered the Maize into existence ten thousand years ago?