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You missed breadfruit.
Strawberries yes. Much smaller, sweeter, tastier- but you could get fresh strawberries only for about a month.
If green unripe tomatoes were poisonous, I’d be dead by now. I just had some with supper, in fact.
Well, kiss maah grits, Aah had no ideaah! Bless your heart for tellin’ me, son.
To expand a little on this:
We look at the molecular genetic divergence between species to construct qualitative phylogenies (order of divergence in the tree of life) and to make quantitative estimates of divergence times and ancestral population sizes. For these purposes, we look at alignable sequence - that is, sequence with sufficient similarity that we can infer common ancestry for that segment of DNA; and we generally look only at single base substitutions, since these mutations occur in a clock-like manner through evolutionary time. In other words, the number of single base differences in alignable sequence is proportional to the time since species divergence.
For the purpose of constructing phylogenies, this “molecular clock” is still valid for alignable sequence regardless of other major changes that may have happened within the genome - there will also be large or small insertions or deletions or duplications or fusions of chromosomes. For phylogenetic purposes, these other phenomena are usually ignored. But, of course - these other changes may be responsible for many phenotypic differences. Quantifying them is much more challenging.
This, in part, is why there is often confusion about exactly what is meant when a statistic such as “chimp and human DNA is only 2% different”, or “3% of our DNA comes from Neanderthals”.
Strawberries may once have been smaller, but the fresh summer strawberries in CA are outrageously good and sweet. Any sweeter it’d be a lump of sugar.
Actually, if you go by where the membership hails from, it is an international board.
Potato plants can put out fruit that resemble small green tomatoes. They contain a lot of solanine, which is poisonous.
There are at least two factors here: yes, heirloom tomatoes have a wider range of flavors (as well as colors, sizes, shapes) than “store bought”. That, by itself, might make them taste better (provided you found a flavor you liked).
But they also tend to ripen, and subsequently go bad, faster than the store variety. So chances are, any heirloom tomatoes have come directly from a garden, picked at their ripest, while the store ones, selected for their staying power rather than their taste, may be weeks old.
So I’m sure it’s true, but it’s like comparing J Lo the person with J Lo the wax dummy at Madame Tussaud’s.
Ah, but the wild ones are horrid, all gritty seeds and hard and bitter, or at best pithy and tasteless.
In my experience as a home gardener, the real distinguishing factor isn’t the variety as much as it is the growing conditions and how long/where you let it ripen.
You can take a super-commercial tomato hybrid like say… Celebrity, and if you take care of it, and let it ripen fully on the fine, it’ll be great. Same for heirloom varieties. I suppose it’s possible that if you let them all ripen on the vine, some heirloom varieties may be more tasty than hybrids, but that’s one of those very faint shades of gray kinds of things in my opinion.
It is worse than that. Modern corn cannot release seeds on it’s own. Without humans, modern corn can’t reproduce.
Actually it does. This creates a problem in areas with important native varieties. Someone brings in the latest and greatest outside variety. Grains fall off a truck. Those plants grow and reproduce naturally next to cultivated fields, etc. They interbreed with the local variety. The characteristics of the native types that might be important to survive in the long term due to local conditions get swamped.
I’m not sure “native” is a word I’d use for corn. But regardless, interpollination can occur and cause problems if you’re saving seeds, but that doesn’t mean corn can reseed itself.
There are a dozen or two wild species, not to mention hybrids, and I’ve yet to encounter one I’d describe as “gritty seeds and hard and bitter, or at best pithy and tasteless.” YMMV, but IME they’re typically superior to the oversized Fragaria x ananassa hybrids one typically finds in the American supermarket, although that may be an artifact of early picking.
In order to crosspollinate, the other variety of corn has to be growing nearby. While in some places the majority is from other nearby planted corn, there is a problem in some regions (some areas of Mexico, for example), where the problem is self-sowing plants. Of course such self-sowing plants don’t breed true but their genes are still capable of being thrown into the mix.
“Life finds a way.”
Strange, how all those loose grains get on trucks without human help.
The point is, corn is tightly wrapped in a thick layer of tough leaves. If no human is there to shuck away the leaves, the seeds rot. Without human intervention, corn is boned in a single generation.
The wild strawberries I’m familiar with are something like this–tiny, and yes, ranging from bitter to tasteless.