"... the deep sutures on cantaloupe in Italian art of the Renaissance or the lack of pigmentation in pictures of watermelon compared to today,"
says UW horticulture professor Jim Nienhuis, who teaches Hort 370, World Vegetable Crops.
"Vegetables are perishable (as opposed to grains), and were domesticated prior to photography, but Renaissance art saves the day."
Here's Giovanni Stanchi's
Frutta e fiori con paesaggio marino (Italian, 15-16th century) overlaid by Nienuis with examples of modern counterparts:
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Before human-induced selection, a corncob was about an inch long. Look at the monsters we have now. And most of the growth was not due to modern hybrids, but artificial selection by our indigenous predecessors. First travelers down the GMO road.
Wild bananas are mostly big black seeds with very little "fruit".
It's weird to think that humans have been effectively genetic engineering for tens of thousands of years.
Modern "greenies" would undo all of this.
"Before human-induced selection, a corncob was about an inch long."
In 1985 a friend and I went hiking in a canyon in Arches National Park. We were told by a park ranger that there was an undisturbed Anasazi (I understand that term is now considered racist or something; forgive me) dwelling. He wouldn't tell us where it was but we found it. There was still a ladder leading into it from the roof entrance and, spread all over the ground, were little tiny corn cobs (sans kernels). There'd been there for hundreds of years. It was quite the moment.
It's weird to think that humans have been effectively genetic engineering for tens of thousands of years.
Not the same thing because science! You cant transplant genes between species because of the risk that those genes might jump between species. Besides, corporatism!
In my lifetime corn has been improved beyond belief; the newer sweet varieties are wonderful to eat. The beefeater tomato of my youth can still be grown in home gardens, but the more commercially viable types, without taste but with shippable texture and form, are not worth eating from the store.
I am not surprised that over hundreds of years, especially after Mendel, the selective improvement of fruits and vegetables has increased in pace.
Nothing is better, though, than a vine-ripe tomato fresh from the garden, sliced into a sandwich with some crisp lettuce and even crisper bacon.
The Characters of Steinbeck's beautiful Salinas Valley comes to mind.
Nothing is better, though, than a vine-ripe tomato fresh from the garden, sliced into a sandwich with some crisp lettuce and even crisper bacon.
Unless that bacon comes from pasture raised pigs. Depending on the time of year of slaughter (pigs put the flavor in their meat the last thirty days or so), you can have very interesting flavors in your pig, fall acorns or peanuts, summer fruits.
And you can probably find fruit that looks and tastes an awful lot like those Renaissance varieties. There are dedicated heirloom horticulturalists who track down and re-create lost cultivars and make the seeds available.
It's interesting how various vegetables and fruits were appreciated for different qualities at different times. Those thick-rind watermelons, for example, wouldn't be very welcome at a picnic but they would probably be great for making pickles. And if you don't have refrigeration, jars full of pickles are a more useful crop than bowls of pink pulp that spoil in a couple days.
While I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia I had the opportunity to eat pineapples. They resembled a pineapple in a miniature form and were incredibly sweet. And the mangoes were smaller, but much tastier than the ones you get here.
Julie C's comment reminded me of something I believe but don't know to be true; namely that the amount of sweetness in a fruit is relatively constant. So as you develop larger varieties, they taste less sweet relative to their smaller predecessors. Is there any actual truth to this?
I think the cantaloupe in the picture is actually what we call "Italian cantaloupe." Stll different, but not as much since its segments are more defined.
Or it could be an Alvaro melon.
(Cantaloupe lover here.)
The Renaissance cantaloupe to me looks like an Italian "zucca" (cooking pumpkin). It's great in risotto.
"While I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia I had the opportunity to eat pineapples."
While I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia I had the best banana I've ever eaten in my entire life. It was in a different league. I don't remember why, but I haven't forgotten it.
Great, Bryan C, now you've got me hungry for pickled watermelon rinds - which are nearly nonexistent in New England, as far as I can tell.
Future vegetable and fruit historians will derive no similar succor from Picasso.
Julie C said...
While I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia I had the opportunity to eat pineapples. They resembled a pineapple in a miniature form and were incredibly sweet. And the mangoes were smaller, but much tastier than the ones you get here.
Everything was better in those days. Vegetables, sex, weed and men.
So we have been eating Frankenfoods all our lives and never knew it. How dare man change vegetables.
"Hort 370, World Vegetable Crops."
All kidding aside, is UW a Great Place or what!
I bet you have to go to class and keep up with the reading in that one.
One of the things that I got fascinated with when I was in the Peace Corps was where different foods had originated in history. There was lots of food in Africa that didn't originate there and I'm sure that's true all over the world now. I tried to find out/figure out where different foods had started, which was pretty difficult pre-internet and with limited connection to outside resources, including electricity and reference materials. I think I did some of my research after I got back.
Corn is a staple food in Zambia and southern Africa and, of course, couldn't have been there before Columbus. Cassava (manioc) was a staple where I lived, but originally comes from South America.
I'm also reminded (in line with some other comments above) that a word for a particular food in one place might not refer to the same food somewhere else. Just as a European buffalo is not the same as a North American buffalo.
Where I was in Liberia, it was pretty common to call a mango a "plum". That was their word for it and since what we call plums don't exist there it was never a problem. There was a particular variety of mango they called a German plum. It was longer and slimmer and curvier and greener (on the outside) than the mangoes we're used to seeing here.
Rocketeer: Old South Pickled Watermelon Rinds - Amazon
But use the Prof's link/search.
The Renaissance? Wasn't that, like, more than a hundred years ago?
I can't remember which came first, the Constitution or the Renaissance. :)
Is it possible that the painters picked fruits that were outside the bell curve of normality at the time?
@kcom -- You may have gotten one of the (now) rare "Gros Michel" bananas. They used to be "the banana" sold in the US, but they're seedless and thus all clones, so a blight nearly wiped them out in the 1950's so they were pretty well gone by 1960. Ever wonder why banana-flavored stuff doesn't taste like bananas? That's why - it tastes more like a Gros Michel than our current Cavendish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtQfJISrFk <-- 6 minutes. Quite interesting.
"that the amount of sweetness in a fruit is relatively constant" . . . Maybe. I find that modern large strawberries hardly taste sweet at all. I had the opportunity very recently to pick and eat some actual wild strawberries found near a woods. They were wonderfully sweet. I used to think it was just a matter of childhood memories. Now I'm not so sure.
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