Scraggy vegetables

Breeding sweet fruits was more than popular among farmers, but they also modified vegetables to a great extent.
The ancient eggplant is poorly represented in the new version of the vegetable. Solanum melongena, the queen of Mediterranean cuisine, comes from an African ancestor called Solanum incanum, and as you can see in the picture it is pretty pitiful. I am not sure that any moussaka can be prepared using that poor thing… The big purple and high containing antioxidants vegetable was obtained thanks to human intervention. Now we enjoy its nutritional and organoleptic properties.
Another species that has changed a lot throughout time is the carrot (Daucus carota). It grows mainly in areas with a temperate climate but its great-grandmother grew in warmer places, more precisely in Persia. The orange vegetable loaded with carotene and fiber that we consume today was produced from the progressive crossing of the ancient strain. What we now eat is the central root, which is thickened and full of carbohydrates, as it occurs in turnips, yucca or ginger. The predecessor of modern carrots was a skinny pathetic unappetizing root, useless to cook tasty cakes.
The cabbage issue is way more complicated but really fascinating. Brassica oleracea, a wild plant from the Brassicaceae family that looks very similar to the field mustard, was continuously crossed until all the different kinds of cabbages we know today were obtained: cauliflower, broccoli, Savoy cabbage, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, romanesco. All these vegetables belong to the same species. Cabbages contain high concentrations of sulphur and this is the reason why they have such an unpleasant smell. They are filled with antioxidants, calcium, and iron, and it high highly recommended to include them in our diet because of its low calories levels.
As you may have observed, humans have genetically modified crops for thousands of years, and this has led to a wide variety of new nutrient-rich species. However, this type of breeding takes time, and it is not very efficient. Plus, it is not possible to select only the desired genes. This is why genetic engineering is used nowadays. There is a highly controversial debate about GMOs and food security in Europe, but this topic needs a whole different post. Spoiler alert: genes are not bad at all, we eat genes every single day and they are not inserted into our genome.
Finally, I would like to share this video where the great science communicator José Cervera explains in an informal and descriptive manner how farmers were the first biotechnologists history, for they shaped our food palette through selective breeding. He quotes J. M. Mulet–a famous Spanish plant biotechnologist a science writer– who states «there is the same amount of biotechnology in a modern vegetable than inside an iPad». And he is quite right.