Common Fruits And Veggies You Didn't Know Were Man-Made

[Music] head to any grocery store and you'll see rows and rows of food products with labels reading organic and all natural but a lot of things we eat today and recognize as all natural or organic food were actually human inventions that's right this week on weird history food we're talking about all the fruits and vegetables you never realized were man-made but before we get started go ahead and subscribe to the weird history Food Channel and let us know in the comments what other surprising food histories you'd like to see okay get ready to unlearn everything you thought you knew about Nature's Bounty as a kid the phrase Eat Your Greens may as well have been engineered by evil mid-century ad Consultants trying to ruin American dinner time turns out that's only half wrong the engineered part is extremely accurate all these vegetables come from the same plant in the brassicasia family like a blonde family and a George R.R Martin Saga these varied vegetables are actually the result of over 2 000 years of meticulous selective inbreeding also like the targaryens the results were mixed lots of hits but also a ton of man-made invasive species after Millennia of farmers trying to play God those years of genetic mutation eventually gave us all the variants with the biggest leaves kale the biggest flower clusters broccoli and the biggest what the a toss-up between Wasabi and canola somewhere in this timeline brussels sprouts were the Frankenstein result of someone messing too much with a cabbage as much as we enjoy a good marzipan there's plenty to fear from The Humble almond back in its wild days almond nuts were bitter and decidingly deadly 50 wild almonds contained enough natural cyanide to kill a fully grown man that's like 25 Almond Joys so how did this extremely poisonous nut become a staple of desserts and Trail mixes while no one is exactly clear on the timeline a 4th century Christian text gave an early clue reading Pierce and almond tree in the trunk near its roots stick a fat plug of pine into its Center and its almond seeds will undergo a remarkable change thus the bitter almonds lose the acidity of their juice and become delicious fruits which wow sounds like a lot of trial and error pour out some almond milk for all those brave souls who gave their lives beta testing bear claws and biscotti so why the hell did this work it turns out jamming Pine into almond bark stressed out the trees so much they stopped producing toxins the grapefruit one of Nature's gifts that truly is inedible without a special utensil and a whole crap ton of sugar what you want to do is you get a grapefruit right okay when you cut both ends off as so then you cut a hole in the middle and it only exists due to sheer laziness millions of years ago there was only one type of citrus plant but then it ate from the Tree of knowledge or something and got split into the big three Citron pomelo and Mandarin this Tangy Trio could only be found in Asia until Europeans started coming through in the 1600s they grabbed the citrus trees with their grubby mitts and replanted them in the West Indies now unlike cruciferous greens a lot of care was taken to keep Citrus plants from cross-pollinating but in mid-15th Century Barbados Sweet Orange got a little too close to a pomelo when no one was looking and created the hybrid known as the forbidden fruit now the grapefruit even though grapefruits technically came into existence in spite of human intervention modern ruby red grapefruits are the result of tinkering after a happy accident resulted in the popular Ruby Red Grapefruit 50s scientists began using radiation on the fruits to trigger even more colorful genetic mutations today's grapefruit are basically the X-Men of the citrus family just without the cool Jet and superpowers bananas are often thought to be tropical fruits in fact the variety most of us are familiar with today came from none other than Jolly Old England via a 19th century Gardener of the Chatsworth house named Joseph Paxton now bananas existed to this point but they bore more of a resemblance to plantains which have more of a potato Vibe going on Old Joe knew he had something special on his hands taking extreme care he nurtured his exotic fruit Until It produced 100 bananas by 1835. in honor of its Origins the fruit was dubbed the Cavendish banana after the family name of the Duke and Duchess living in Chatsworth where Paxton worked carrots are known for their orangeness but did you know that they used to be a totally different hue the wild carrot plant actually has white tap Roots it wasn't until the year 900 when humans started domesticating them the taproots began turning purple and yellow a sixth Century Constantinople copy of the first century Greek physician diascorities is pharmacopia De Materia Medica is the first record of someone suggesting that anyone eat the roots of these weird weeds carrots made their way to Spain by the 8th century and by the 10th Century India Asia and Europe were all cultivating the purple root in the 16th century carrots could be found all around the world in all sorts of Hues except orange white yellow red purple and even sometimes black that's the carrot that writes Moody poetry in the 17th century the Dutch claimed to have tweaked the coloring in honor of the Dutch flag and will in the orange but modern horticulturists think it's more likely that the carrots were descended from selective cross breeding to create a sweeter version of The Bitter yellow root vegetable so don't discount those purple Farmers Market carrots as a weird fad they're actually old news boysenberry the name's so nice you were like huh that's a thing boys and Berry yes this delicious pie filling was willed into existence all the way back in the 1920s Anaheim when Rudolph poison a mad horticulturist tried to create a raspberry Blackberry Loganberry hybrid the plants ended up producing large flavor-packed berries but boys and by that point was distracted trying to sell his farm turns out there's not a lot of money in trying to cross breed berries we did say he was mad he almost missed the neglected berries completely had an agent of the U.S department of Agriculture George mdaro not taken notice the feds were bowled over by this new type of fruit but needed an expert's opinion enter neighboring farmer Walter Knott a renowned Berry expert and Future theme park founder together daro and Knott's Berry Farm's progenitor propagated these populist purple pods around his property and Knots began selling them from his very stand in 1932. by the time they hit the shelves three years later later people were going Gaga over the Newberry when asked what he called his hybrid fruit not said boysenberry after his former neighbor the peach is an old old fruit there are fossils from 2.6 million years ago that share the same outer seed shell as the modern Peach originally it was believed to have been cultivated first in Persia during the Neolithic era but recent studies suggest they were first grown in 6000 BC in the sheijang province of China Alexander the Great was thought to have introduced peaches to Greece after his sojourn to Persia and Romans were growing them after the first century the Spanish brought them to the Americas in the 16th century though it took another 100 years before they would reach England and the rest of Europe through horticulturist George Minify originally peaches were small sour fruits with stones that took up 35 percent of the total fruit only by humans effing around with the peach have we grown larger sweeter versions today peaches are only 10 pit roughly the same percentage of the cast of Ocean's 11. strawberries truly the James Bond of the fruitverse with a sordid history of Espionage hiding behind that innocent red tush the juicy red berries were small and sour and long used as decorative fruit more like potpourri than something you sliced into cereal like most fruit back in Ye Old Days the strawberries were small and sour though by the 1300s French Farmers began cultivating wild strawberries to make them sweeter but still really tiny in 1714 a French military spy named amadi Francois frezier was tasked with navigating through pirate-infested Waters by Louis XIV and ended up in Chile incidentally frezier means strawberry and French and his ancestor whose name was we kid you not Julius DeBerry had been knighted after bringing strawberries to the crowd while living off the grid in Chile frezier noticed that the country was growing much larger and tastier strawberries when it came time to return to France frezier brought three plants back on the ship but the Chilean strawberries remained Baron for years because they just weren't crossbreeding well with their French cousins which sounds wrong hearing it out loud fast forward 50 years when a 17 year old horticulturist named Antoine Nicholas duchenne presented Louis XV with a large pot of the Chilean strain of fruit Louis flipped out he loved the fruit so much he had the Castle Gardens of Versailles populated with hundreds of strawberry plants to which duchenne introduced a Chilean genus that led to a happy accident by putting the non-replicating Chilean strawberries next to Virginia strawberries that had been recently imported the result was the modern strawberry the fruit that you're picturing when you hear the word watermelon are actually new watermelons for centuries watermelons were mostly seeds with a white rind throughout the inside so in case you thought these melons were hard to eat today imagine how difficult it was to make a novelty margarita in the 17th century in fact for most of History watermelons weren't treated like food at all they were portable water units since they like cacti and camels could store a ton of liquid to transport in the desert early versions of watermelons were first discovered near the Dead Sea and 5 000 year old prehistoric seeds have been found in the area where Libya currently sits cultivated in India in the 7th century and reaching China's Shores by the 10th Century the old watermelons reproduced fast because of all those seeds you see but they would bear smaller more bitter fruits by the time European Farmers began producing them in mass in the 17th century they were tweaking the natural formula selectively breeding fruits with fewer seeds and more red juicy bulb in apple a day keeps the doctor away but did you know if it wasn't for human intervention we'd probably never get to eat the same kind of apple twice that's because like snowflakes and fingerprints and apple seeds are each uniquely different from the other even if you planted two seeds from two apples of the same tree you'd get different types of fruit so how could farmers keep tabs on their crop yield of red delicious to Green granny apples orchardists had to learn to graft the qualities they wanted to see in the fruit onto rootstock trees today there are over 7 500 unique types of apple cultivars from Abram which are small and tender with red skin and white flesh tazuka malio which are greenish red crispy fruits that are more juicy and aromatic huh guess you really can compare apples to apples like eggplants and peppers tomatoes are part of the nightshade family which can be well deadly plus Tomatoes give off a putrid odor hence throwing Rotten Tomatoes at performers as a visual metaphor for stinkiness which may have put people off eating them around 7 000 years ago in the area we know today is Mexico Aztecs began cultivating wild blueberry sized model which the Spanish renamed to mates when they brought it back home from there the fruit yes tomatoes are fruit spread like wildfire all over Europe eventually making its way back to North America only a few hundred miles from its birthplace culinarily tomatoes are a vegetable despite them technically being berries that grow in a Vine that's because tomatoes have a much lower sugar content than fruits also fruits aforementioned peppers cucumbers avocados eggplants squashes green beans like a bunch of stuff why does any of the classifications matter in 1887 the U.S put a tariff on the import of vegetables but not fruit leading to The Landmark case in 1893 NYX versus the United States the result of the ruling determined that for legal purposes relating only to tariffs and not you know taxonomy Tomatoes were actually vegetables since that's how we use them in cooking corn is one of the most essential Foods in the world and not only because six percent of all calories come directly from corn we use it to fuel our vehicles feed livestock and make syrup corn or Maize as it was called by Aztecs living in Mexico 10 000 years ago didn't really resemble the bright yellow cobs we'd recognized today through genetic testing it's been determined that ancient corn actually descended from a plant called teacenti and looks more like grass than the long stalks that populate Farms tayasanti plants only produced a few dark kernels per stock so early cultivators had to be very selective in their breeding saving only the biggest kernels to plan for the next year's stock stock eventually those bigger genetic Offspring became Maize but it definitely took some early human engineering for one teacenti seeds had a tough outer shell that was hard to crack theories and evidence support several possibilities of how humans crack the corn puzzle some say it was by Heating and ultimately popping the kernels some point to early grinding Mills still others say our ancestors crushed the shells in our teeth to get at the seeds which if you've ever tried to chew a popcorn kernel is no easy task so we just want to say thank you to the Intrepid Souls who stuck with shelling and popping protocol in order to replant mutated strains with more Rose softer shells and sweeter fruit today corn a cereal grain though the kernels are also considered fruit as we play things fast and loose in the taxonomy department has overtaken rice and wheat production worldwide it's the most widely grown crop in America with 284 metric tons grown a year and 85 percent of corn grow in the U.S are genetically modified organisms or GMOs so take that corny talk about organic all-natural foods with a grain of salt and a butter Pat we wouldn't have corn as we know it today had we just left it up to Mother Nature so what do you think which man-made food surprised you the most let us know in the comments below and while you're at it check out some of these other videos from weird history food

Channel: Weird History Food

Views: 157,328

Keywords: fruits that are actually man made, vegetables that are man made, human made fruits and vegetables, fruits and veggies made by humans, fruits and veggies not found in nature, weird history food, weird history food vegetables, history of food, history of fruit, history of vegetables, unnatural fruits, unnatural vegetables, what fruits and vegetables are man made?, grapefruit, oranges, fruits and vegetables, tasting history with max miller, thrillist, eater, be amazed, mashed, epicurious

Id: eADdBB9loAU

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022