Breeding

Something interesting I wanted to get a snapshot of. On the left is a gala apple (Gala being the breed of course.), yellow, pink and red dappled, large and as full of sugar as half a can of coke. In the middle we have a crab apple, the original apple humans breed for snacking upon. Much smaller, much more bitter and this variety isn't red at all. It's a sort of proto-Granny Smith (Again that being the breed. And possibly the person who invented them.) This is the type of apple we first bred for consumption. On the far right, a wild apple, as in one that has not had its genetic material tinkered with by humans, ever. It looks rather like a cherry, but you can see it bears scars on the skin that cherries do not. Missing is a sample of the older varieties of apples, from say the middle ages. These tend to be intermediate in size, golf ballish.

The wild apple is all core and largely seed. Birds eat it, often whole. That little inedible bit at the bottom is proper size for a fruit this tiny. It contains little sugar. Know what apples are related to? Roses. You can see it, looking at these fruit. And yet look, look at what we've done 'naturally'. If we used genetic engineering to make tomatoes the size of watermelons nobody would even look at them lest they get eye cancer. But we chop down modern apples as a natural, all-good for you snack not even thinking on how their sugar content has doubled in less than 50 years.

Our food is freakish, be it from a factory or grown in your garden. You can never escape how radically we've reshaped the world.