Fruits and vegetables were once very different from what we know today.

It’s no secret that many of the vegetables and fruits we eat today can be quite different than they used to be. Humanity has managed to perfect several types of food and today we can assess their taste and appearance. In this post you will see what bananas, eggplants and other natural delights were like before human intervention.

O awesome.club invites you to take a trip to the past to appreciate the foods of today.

Judging by this painting by Giovanni Stanchi (17th century), watermelon was very different from what we taste today. With the help of plant breeding, the researchers managed to get rid of the inedible veins, which were previously found in excess. Well, of course, the taste must also be well differentiated.

The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia were already eating bananas 10,000 years ago. However, banana cultivation began 7,000 years ago. But the flavor and shape is quite different from the fruit we bring to our table today. Today’s bananas are a hybrid between the Malayan banana (Musa acuminata) and the male banana (Musa balbisiana), with an improvement in taste and appearance.

The first vegetables were grown in China and were not so similar to today’s. They were full of thorns, small, they had all kinds of colors, from yellow to blue. It took a long time for the vegetable to have the shape it has today and get rid of the thorns.

Previously, peaches were completely different. They were more like a cherry than the big, juicy fruit we now call a peach. The first ones began to be consumed as food in China around 4 thousand years BC Since then, the fruit has undergone considerable changes both in taste and in its shape.

The cucumber’s ancestors had thorns and were almost completely composed of seeds. But more importantly, these vegetables were poisonous and cultivated for medicinal purposes. Cucumber as a food appeared in India over 6,000 years ago.

The avocado appeared in the Aztec civilization in the 3rd century BC under the name of ahuacatl, translated from the Nahualt language as “testicle”, perhaps because of its resemblance to the male sex gland. First, its seed was crushed and mixed with soot and then used as medicine. Precisely that same seed occupied almost 80% of the avocado. The ancient fruit does not compare to today’s avocado.

At first, the tomatoes looked like small dark berries. The homeland of the tomato is Central and South America. In Europe for a long time they were considered poisonous and cultivated as decorative plants.