Almost nothing in the produce aisle looks like its wild ancestor. Cabbage, broccoli and kale were one scruffy seaside plant; corn began as a grass with a dozen armored kernels; the watermelon's closest wild relative still grows in Sudan. These stories follow fruits and vegetables from the mountainside to the market stall, with a few botanical surprises along the way.
Every tile in a Fruits and Vegetables game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Fruits
nine stories
1The fruit that was renamed for a bird
On the tile: Kiwifruit1959
A New Zealand school principal, Mary Isabel Fraser, carried seeds home from China in 1904, and a Whanganui farmer named Alexander Allison planted them. The vines fruited in 1910, and for half a century the crop was sold as the Chinese gooseberry. When exporters Turners and Growers went after the American market, their importer said the name had to go. On June 15, 1959, they started calling it kiwifruit, after the small brown bird New Zealanders were already named for.
In 1870 the U.S. Department of Agriculture imported twelve budded orange trees from Bahia, Brazil. A few years later, some of them reached Eliza Tibbets in Riverside, California. The fruit was seedless, easy to peel and sweet, and within a decade the Washington navel was the most widely planted variety in the area. Because navels carry no seeds, every tree since has been propagated by budding rather than grown from seed.
The strawberry in your grocery basket is a transatlantic hybrid barely three centuries old. In 1714 Amedee-Francois Frezier, a French engineer and spy sent to map Spanish ports in Chile, carried home a few large-fruited Chilean plants. They ended up in Brittany, interplanted with the Virginia strawberry that North America had already sent over. The two species crossed, and the plump result, Fragaria x ananassa, is the ancestor of every garden strawberry grown today.
Before the 1950s, the export banana was the Gros Michel, or Big Mike. Then Panama disease, caused by a soil fungus, swept through the plantations of Central America and ended it commercially. Growers replaced it with the Cavendish, which shrugged off that strain of the fungus, and the Cavendish is the banana in supermarkets today. The rescue was temporary. A strain called TR4 turned up at the end of the 1980s, and the Cavendish has no defense against it.
Growing a pineapple in the English climate took a heated pit and a gardener's undivided attention. In 1720 Henry Telende worked out that fermenting tanner's bark from the leather trade would hold the heat, and hothouse pineapples became possible for the very rich. They also became the ultimate centerpiece. Some shops rented the fruit out by the day, so a host could display one at dinner and send it back uneaten.
Blueberries grew wild in the New Jersey Pine Barrens for centuries, and nobody farmed them. Frederick Coville, a botanist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, worked out what the plants needed. Elizabeth Coleman White, who spent her summers on her family's cranberry farm in the Pine Barrens, recruited local pickers to scour the woods for the bushes with the best berries. Their first commercial crop went on sale in 1916, and the blueberry industry grew out of that partnership.
The story goes that Maria Ann Smith threw the remains of a crab apple onto the bank of a creek on her farm at Eastwood, outside Sydney. What is on the record is that she found a seedling there in 1868 bearing green apples, and that she died in 1870, long before anyone made money from it. Local orchardists kept showing the variety as Smith's seedling, and by 1895 a fruit expert with the New South Wales Department of Agriculture was recommending it for export.
A seedling nobody had planted came up among the Yellow Bellflower trees in Jesse Hiatt's Iowa orchard. He chopped it down; it grew back. He chopped it down again; it came back again. He gave up and let it fruit, and it produced a red-and-gold striped apple he named the Hawkeye for his home state. At least eight nurserymen turned it away for its odd oblong shape. Then it won Stark Brothers' 1894 fruit show, and the company renamed it Delicious, later Red Delicious.
Every cranberry carries four small air pockets. That is why growers can flood a bog and float the crop off the vines, and why a firm berry bounces on a hard surface while a soft one only thuds. The bounce is not a parlor trick. Dry-harvested fruit is delivered to a receiving station and screened by color and by whether it will bounce, so the berries that reach the fresh-fruit aisle are the ones that passed a bouncing test.
Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale and Brussels sprouts are not cousins. They are one species, Brassica oleracea, a plant native to the coasts of southern and western Europe. Over centuries growers pushed it in different directions, selecting for leaves in one line, buds in another, a swollen stem in a third, until a single wild plant had become six vegetables that share a shelf and nothing else.
In 1953 John Laughnan, a corn geneticist at the University of Illinois, tasted kernels carrying a mutation called shrunken-2 and found them unusually sweet. The mutation slows the conversion of sugar into starch, leaving several times more sugar in the kernel. Growers were skeptical and his funding dried up, so he kept breeding on his own farm with his sons. The supersweet hybrids that followed now dominate the fresh sweet corn sold in the United States.
The Scoville scale did not begin as a hot sauce bragging right. In 1912 Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist and chemist at the drug company Parke-Davis, needed a way to measure the capsaicin that gave muscle salves their warmth. He had a panel of human tasters sip pepper extract diluted in sugar water, adding more water until the heat was just barely perceptible. That level of dilution became the Scoville Heat Unit. Laboratory instruments do the measuring now, but the number still carries his name.
In a nine-square-mile patch of West Yorkshire, rhubarb roots are grown outdoors until they have banked enough energy, then moved into windowless heated sheds. In total darkness the plant burns through its reserves hunting for light, throwing up pale pink stalks that stay tender and sweet. Growers work by candlelight, because brighter light would end the process. The stems can lengthen more than an inch a day, fast enough to hear.
American groceries sell soft orange sweet potatoes labeled as yams, and they are not. Sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. True yams belong to a different family, Dioscoreaceae, and are widely grown in Africa, South America and Central America. Even the edible part differs: a sweet potato is a root, a yam is a tuber. The Department of Agriculture requires that sweet potatoes sold as yams carry the words sweet potato too.
In 1995 potato cuttings rode into orbit inside Astroculture, a plant growth chamber built at the University of Wisconsin and lit by high-intensity light-emitting diodes instead of sunlight. The question was straightforward: would a plant that stores its food underground still know what to do with no gravity to tell it which way is down? It did. Over sixteen days the cuttings formed tubers about a centimeter and a half across, matching ground-grown tubers down to the starch grains.
For decades chemists assumed the tear gas in an onion was a byproduct of a single enzyme, alliinase, released when the cells are cut. In 2002 a study showed that a second enzyme does the work, now called lachrymatory factor synthase. It catches an unstable intermediate and rearranges it into the volatile compound that reaches your eyes. The tears are not an accident of chemistry but the product of a dedicated enzyme.
People who hated Brussels sprouts as children are not imagining the change. In the early 1990s researchers pinned the bitterness on two compounds, sinigrin and progoitrin. Seed companies dug through their archives for old varieties low in both, grew them out in test plots, and cross-pollinated the mildest with modern high-yield plants. A variety called Maximus reached the market in 1994, and the vegetable's reputation began a slow recovery that is still going.
Between 1856 and 1863, in the garden of an abbey in what is now Brno, Gregor Mendel grew roughly twenty-eight thousand pea plants. He tracked seven traits, among them seed shape, pod shape, flower position and stem length, and counted the offspring carefully enough to see a pattern nobody had noticed. Heredity was not a blending of the parents; it came in discrete units. His work drew almost no notice, and he died in 1884 unrecognized.
The apple did not have to be invented. In the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, Malus sieversii grows wild in forests where some trees bear fruit that would pass unnoticed in a grocery display. Nikolai Vavilov traced the apple back to that region in 1929. Genetic work since has found that roughly 46 percent of the domestic apple genome comes from the Kazakh wild apple. Almaty's older name, Alma-Ata, translates as father of the apples.
About nine thousand years ago, in the Balsas River region of Mexico, farmers began working with teosinte, a bushy grass whose ear holds five to fifteen kernels, each locked inside a hard case. Two genes did much of the heavy lifting. One turned a many-branched plant into a single stalk. Another opened the casings, leaving the kernels bare on the cob. The result carries eight to twenty-two rows of naked kernels and looks nothing like its ancestor.
Solanum pimpinellifolium, the wild ancestor of every tomato we eat, still grows in northern Peru and southern Ecuador, and its fruit is about the size of a shelled pea. Domestication traded variety for size and uniformity: cultivated tomatoes carry only a small share of the genetic variation the wild species holds. Breeders now go back to that scruffy roadside plant when they need disease resistance or flavor they cannot find in the crop.
Nikolai Vavilov built the world's first great seed bank in Leningrad, gathering hundreds of thousands of samples of the crops people depend on. When the city was besieged during the Second World War, the staff kept the collection whole: seeds, grains, nuts and tubers stayed in the building while the people minding them went hungry. Nine of them died of starvation. Vavilov himself had been arrested in 1940, and died in prison in 1943.
Agriculture is usually told as a story about the Middle East, the Andes and Mexico. Kuk Swamp, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, belongs on that list. High concentrations of banana phytoliths in layers dated 7,000 to 6,400 years ago point to deliberate planting there, in plots worked within a grassland managed by fire. Phytoliths are the microscopic silica bodies plants build in their tissues, and they outlast the plant in the soil by millennia.
In a dry cave in Oaxaca called Guila Naquitz, archaeologists found squash seeds, rinds and stem fragments that were larger and differently shaped than the wild gourds around them, the signature of a plant under human selection. The dates run between about ten thousand and eight thousand years ago. Among directly dated domesticated plants in the Americas, this squash comes first, by a margin of several thousand years over maize and beans.
The mutiny on the Bounty was a botanical mission gone wrong. William Bligh had been sent to Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees and carry them to the Caribbean, where planters wanted a cheap, starchy food for the enslaved people forced to work the sugar estates. The first attempt ended in 1789 when the crew seized the ship. Bligh went back in 1791 with the Providence and the Assistant, and delivered breadfruit to St. Vincent in January 1793.
On a Norwegian island inside the Arctic Circle, a tunnel runs more than three hundred feet into a mountain to storage rooms chilled to just below zero Fahrenheit. Permafrost and thick rock would hold the seeds frozen even if the power failed. Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault now holds more than 1.4 million seed samples sent by genebanks around the world. Only one depositor has ever drawn seeds back out: a research center that lost access to its collection in Syria.
The carrot was domesticated in the Early Middle Ages, in the region running from western Asia into central Asia, and the roots people grew there were commonly purple or yellow. Orange came much later. Genetic work points to the orange carrot being selected during the Renaissance, probably in western Europe, and it took three recessive genes working together to stack up the alpha- and beta-carotene that gives the root its color.
Botanically, a berry is a fleshy fruit that develops from the ovary of a single flower and carries its seeds in the pulp. By that rule bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados and grapes are berries. Strawberries are not. A strawberry is an accessory fruit: the sweet red part grows from tissue outside the ovary, and the real fruits are the little specks on the surface. Raspberries and blackberries are aggregates, built from many ovaries in one flower.
A peanut is not a nut. It is a legume, in the same family as peas and beans, and it does something almost no other legume does. The flowers open in the air, but after fertilization a stalk called a peg elongates from the base of the ovary, bends toward the ground and drives the developing pod into the soil, where it ripens in the dark. The plant's other name says it plainly: groundnut.
A fig is not a fruit. It is an inflorescence, a cluster of tiny flowers lining the inside of a hollow stem. In pollinating species the only way in is a bract-lined opening at the tip, narrow enough that a female wasp forcing through it usually loses her wings and antennae. She lays her eggs, pollinates the flowers and dies inside, where the fig digests her. Most commercial figs set fruit without any of this.
Under an 1883 tariff, imported vegetables were taxed and fruit was not, so an importer sued to have tomatoes classed as fruit. The case reached the Supreme Court, where counsel read dictionary definitions into the record. On May 10, 1893, Justice Gray wrote for the Court that tomatoes count as vegetables in the common speech of sellers and buyers, served with the meal rather than as dessert. Botany lost to the dinner table.
The belief that carrots grant night vision came out of wartime Britain. RAF crews were finding enemy aircraft in the dark using new airborne interception radar, which was secret, and the Ministry of Information credited the diet of ace pilot John Cunningham, nicknamed Cat's Eyes, instead. The Ministry of Food ran with it, pushing carrots through rationing with a cartoon figure called Doctor Carrot. Vitamin A corrects vision damaged by deficiency; it does not improve healthy eyes.
A West African berry contains a protein called miraculin that latches onto the sweet receptors on your tongue without switching them on. Then acid arrives. At low pH the protein changes shape, activates the receptor it is already holding, and sour food registers as sweet. Bite a lemon afterward and it reads as lemonade. The effect lasts roughly half an hour, which is long enough to make a very confusing snack.
Plant a seed from a Granny Smith and you will not get a Granny Smith. Apples reshuffle their genes every generation, so a seedling is a roll of the dice, usually a sour one. Named varieties are kept going by grafting: a twig from the original tree joined to a rootstock, making a clone. John Chapman, remembered as Johnny Appleseed, called grafting wicked and planted only seeds, which is why his apples mostly went to the cider press.
The jackfruit, native to India, is the largest fruit that grows on a tree. A common one weighs ten to sixty pounds, and the longest reach three feet. It does not dangle from twigs. Short, stout flowering shoots emerge from the trunk and the big limbs, and the fruit grows straight off that wood. The heaviest on record, verified by Guinness World Records in June 2016, weighed 42.72 kilograms, or about 94 pounds. That is one fruit, on one tree.
The silk on an ear of corn is not packing material. Each strand is a style, a living tube running from one ovule on the cob out past the husk. A grain of pollen lands on a silk, germinates within minutes, grows down the thread and fertilizes that one ovule within a day. No pollen on a given silk, no kernel in that spot. An ear can start with a thousand ovules; four to six hundred usually reach harvest.