FRUITFUL CHANGES
10 Common Fruits That Used To Be Completely Different
Published on March 18, 2024
Credit: Jacopo Maia
As humanity's agricultural practices evolved, crops changed shape, taste, and even color. And although we like to think of the fruits we know and love as timeless creations of nature, the truth is that they have also transformed over time—and a lot!
Here are 10 intriguing examples of fruits that underwent significant changes before becoming the fruits we know today.
Bananas
Credit: Anastasia Eremina
Bananas have an interesting (and complex) story. Initially, they weren’t the fleshy, tasty treats we know today, but were almost inedible and had enormous seeds in them. Through selective breeding over dozens of generations, humans transformed bananas into the sweet, seedless fruit we know today. But the changes didn’t stop there: in the first half of the twentieth century, the main banana cultivar in the world was victim to a mysterious disease that almost wiped out bananas completely, and they had to be replaced with a more resistant variety.
Apples
Credit: Shelley Pauls
Wild apples were small, sour, and varied greatly in flavorand not necessarily for good. Over many centuries, humans chose to grow and eat the ones that were larger and more palatable, leading to sweeter fruits with a more consistent flavor. Our ancestors brought these "elite" seeds around with them while they traveled the world, giving rise to many of the cultivars we know today.
Watermelons
Credit: Sahand Babali
Once, watermelons weren’t bigger than a peach. You might find that hard to believe, but most of what we now love about watermelons was selected for thousands of years. Unfortunately, this came at a cost. In the process, watermelons lost genetic diversity, and became more vulnerable to pests and diseases, making them harder to grow.
Grapes
Credit: Maja Petric
One of the earliest domesticated fruit crops, grapes have been a part of human history for millennia. How early grapes exactly looked is kind of a mystery, but we can guess that they were smaller and not all that sweet (starting to see a pattern here?). Fortunately, our ancestors loved the fruit so much that they bred hundreds of varieties, some for winemaking and others to feed their families.
Strawberries
Credit: Jacek Dylag
What we call a strawberry is not even a berry. And, to be fair, they are not even a "purebred" fruit, but rather a "hybrid" of two different related species. The hybridization was intentional and was part of the domestication of wild strawberries—that were initially tiny and packed with too many seeds. We can thank this intense selection process for the sweet, juicy treat they are today.
Peaches
Credit: Ian Baldwin
Peaches originally appeared in China, and, according to botanical experts, they were way smaller than they are today and, allegedly, "tasted like a lentil." Yeah, we are as surprised as you. However, after nearly six thousand years of artificial selection, domesticated peaches grew to be 16 times larger, sweeter, and juicier than their wild counterparts, while also increasing the amount of nutrients essential to human survival.
Oranges
Credit: Max
Not even the timeless orange is safe here. Yeah, you guessed it, they used to be nothing like what we now expect of a standard orange, being generally smaller and bitter than today’s sweet and juicy cultivars. Interestingly, they were also the result of hybridization between two varieties of citrus we are still familiar with: pomelo (Citrus maxima) and mandarin (Citrus reticulata).
Avocados
Credit: Hitoshi Namura
Though avocados were only semi-domesticated, with early humans in the American continent choosing to grow wild varieties rather than keep specialized plantations, their evolutionary history is quite surprising. This fruit evolved at the beginning of the Cenozoic era, when the local megafauna (very large animals like the megatherium) ate it whole, helping its seeds begin their germination process within their stomachs. Relics of a long gone past, they were only saved from extinction by human intervention.
Mangoes
Credit: Alexander Schimmeck
Similarly to avocados, the "king of fruits" is today considered an evolutionary anachronism, as its large seeds were once dispersed by now-extinct animals. However, as humans fell in love with the tasty fruit, mango species dispersed far from their original range, giving birth to hundreds of different varieties that resulted in an overall sweeter and less fibrous fruit.
Pineapples
Credit: Juno Jo
Though little is known about its domestication, pineapples were already a staple crop of South American societies at least a millennia before Europeans arrived. The wild fruit had various uses, including making alcoholic beverages, medicines, and even crafting poison arrows. After contact, Europeans went bananas over this new exotic and strange-tasting fruit, but they were so expensive that most used them only as decoration and did not start to eat them until they began to rot.
