I’ve mostly seen morels in a blend of dried mushrooms. I would think someone would try cultivating those especially, but maybe they’re hard to grow? I know they supposedly like to grow after a forest fire. Wikipedia only says “Due to the mushroom’s prized fruit bodies, several attempts have been made to grow the fungus in culture. In 1901, Repin reported successfully obtaining fruit bodies in a cave in which cultures had been established in flower pots nine years previously in 1892”
I just read that zoos are cutting down on the fruit they give the animals because “modern” fruit has such an “artificially” high sugar content compared to the fruit these animals eat in their native forests. The animals’ teeth are falling out!
Note that even cultivated morels are not significantly genetically modified, even just by farmer selection. They’re mostly using wild mushroom spores.
Note that some meats other than fish have “original” DNA. I think bison is probably the most popular among large land animals in the US. At least it’s generally available in stores around here.
Most wild bison are hybridized, having some cattle DNA (but not 50/50). There were only a handful of genetically pure populations, but some of those have been seed stock for repopulating other areas.
European bison too: the hybrid is called the
Edit: SDMB doesn’t like Polish diacritics? Zubron
What about the “Cotton Candy grapes” that are suddenly popping up in stores? Are they grown to be whatever horrid little things they are, or does somebody just infuse them with artificial flavors?
Those are what is commonly understood as “non-GMO” since it’s selective breeding of hybrids done entirely by hand.
Here’s their site:
That is the rub and a common problem with individuals who subscribe to a natural is good world view.
speciation in Cotton Candy grapes took ~100,000 attempts in a test tube to randomly produce an acceptable, marketable result.
There have been quite a few threads in Great Debates discussing the real risk of waiting for random events using Hybridization or radiation compared to GMO.
The answer to this being or good or bad is difficult to have an empirical answer for because it really does depend on an individual’s world view to assign that morality to. In theory GMO, if the scientists knew what they were doing, should be safer as it would be an intentional targeted change. But we also wouldn’t have the ability to support the current Human population without changing crops over time and none of the staples or major calorie sources is objectively “natural” in that case. The yields, storage life, and disease resistance simply demand this.
To go back to the OP, as much fruit cavendish bananas, navel oranges, and granny smith apples are all genetically identical to each other and are clones, to answer the question one would have to state a starting point.
The popular cloned fruits are probably the least modified over several decades by simply not using genetic transfer at all for replication, one would have to decide how far back in our species agrarian past to firmly set a bar.
Maybe set the bar to Mendel.