12 Everyday Fruits And Veggies That Were Actually Created By Humans

Who knew the origin of modern-day strawberries included espionage? While the juicy red berries have long been known as decorative fruits, they weren't eaten regularly at first, because they were very small and not super tasty. In the 1300s, the French started cultivating wild strawberries to make them tastier, but they were still quite small. 

Enter a French spy, who smuggled a Chilean strawberry from Chile in 1714. The fruit's valuable attribute was that it was much larger than any of the European kinds. The smuggled strawberry plants were crossbred with others, giving rise to the ones we're familiar with today. 

Do you know the significance of peaches in Chinese culture? A peach tree symbolizes longevity and good fortune in Chinese mythology. This may be why peaches are one of the oldest domesticated fruits - with documentation of their cultivation going back approximately 2,500 years. 

Wild peaches were originally small, sour fruits, with the stone comprising more than 35% of the total fruit. Today's peaches are much larger and sweeter, with the stone taking up only 10% of the succulent, fuzzy fruit. 

Name an orange vegetable. 

Chances are, you probably said carrot. (Not only because there's a photo of one right here.) A carrot's color is an integral part of its identity. Yet before humans got involved, carrots weren't orange at all. 

The wild carrot plant actually had white roots. Then, as people began domesticating it around the year 900, the taproots took on purple or yellow hues. The famous orange carrot that we love today wasn't seen until the 15th century. (This means the other-colored carrots you see at farmers' markets are actually very old, rather than new!)

Children across the world may be devasted to learn that broccoli was, in fact, mankind's invention. But it wasn't just broccoli: Cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts all come from the same plant - a cruciferous vegetable in the Brassicaceae family.

What is this wondrous, amazing mother foliage? It's the simple wild mustard plant. But this simple plant evolved splendidly with selective breeding. Starting more than 2,000 years ago, farmers painstakingly chose different combinations to try out. They reproduced the plants with the biggest leaves (creating kale). They created plants with larger flower clusters, which they harvested before they bloomed (broccoli). From broccoli came cauliflower. And from cabbage came Brussels sprouts. 

So, the next time you enjoy some of your favorite cruciferous veggies, remember to thank the wild mustard plant.  

The grapefruit can likely thank its existence to laziness. 

Millions of years ago, the original citrus plant reportedly separated into the “Big Three” parent citrus plants of the world: citron, pomelo, and mandarin [ you can see a citron here.] Most resided in Asia; however, in the 1600s, Europeans got their hands on citrus trees and started planting them all around the West Indies. 

While care typically went into keeping the plants from crossbreeding (to avoid inbreeding and fruitless plants), in Barbados, people didn't seem to care. Citrus hybridizes with relative ease and, lo and behold: In the mid-1600s, the “forbidden fruit” was born - an old Barbadian nickname for the grapefruit.

Bitter and poisonous - not words you typically associate with the humble almond. But back in the day, that's exactly what wild almonds were. In fact, eating fewer than 50 wild, bitter almonds could prove fatal to an adult due to the presence of hydrocyanic acid, a natural form of cyanide.

So how did the almond go from a distasteful, toxic nut to the second-most popular nut in the world? It's not exactly clear. However, a passage from St. Basil's Hexaemeron, a fourth-century Christian text, gives insight into what our ancestors did with almond trees. As quoted from NPR:

Pierce an 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.

And it turns out, this isn't just mumbo jumbo - scientists theorize that jamming the pine wood into the tree may have stressed it so much that it stopped its toxin production. These days, however, we consume the fruit of the sweet almond tree; its nuts have been selectively bred to contain almost no cyanide - certainly not even close to a dangerous amount.