Answer This, Please. . .

a reply to: Lazarus Short

My wife and I were camping in Bavaria. A wild strawberry plant grew right by our tent. It in had one strawberry. We are it the morning we left, and felt so cool eating a wild strawberry for breakfast!

OP, simple -- we crossbred the crap out of the dinky-yield wild stuff to get the large-yielding domesticated crops we know today. I wouldn't put them in the same class of GMO as ones crossed in labs with animal or insect DNA, though, but it was (and is still in use & thus is) an early example of GMO crop experimentation.

Take, for example, the wild bitter watermelons of Africa -- they're juicy, but horribly bitter. But after ages of cultivation and crossing them, we have countless varieties of the modern summer fruit snack staple everyone knows.

Or, for even better understanding, look up corn/maize. Ears of corn used to be about an inch long many millennia ago. Get out your tape measure and measure your next ear of corn at dinner, and think about how tiny that corn's ancestors used to be and how far it's come from there!

originally posted by: Lazarus Short
I recall that apple trees grow wild in Kazakhstan, the region from which they originated.

And the capital of Almaty is derived from the Kazakh root word for apples, "alma". I believe it's a root work for it in several Turkic languages, too.
The oldest known ancestral variety is still grown today in the Almaty region -- Malus Sieversii


Edit: Also, the food staples we eat today are from all OVER the world, so the odds of stumbling across that Kazakh ancestral apple variety is nil to none elsewhere outside that country.
Corn is from the Americas along with peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes.
Oranges likely originated in China out of a cross between two citrus fruits -- a Mandarin Orange (but the Mandarin fruit name has nothing to do with it, that has French origins) and a Pomelo (native to SE Asia) I say "likely originated" in China because the earliest mentions of oranges were about 1700 years ago, in China.
The earliest peas found seem to have originated in Greece, but it's "zone" was probably the eastern Mediterranean and Near East (i.e Turkey/Iran) in general.


I could keep going, but I hope you get the idea that thanks to crossbreeding and global cultivation, we're literally eating a global diet anymore.

a reply to: esteay812


At the central California coast, one section of the Guadalupe Dunes has a State Park of the same name. When we took the guided tour of the dunes, the docent pointed out wild strawberry plants to us. They are fairly small, but apparently do well in the sand dunes area that is right near the beach. Note: Along the California coast, which was closed during the first months of the pandemic, several endangered populations of beach nesting birds experienced a population increase during their spring nesting season when the beaches were undisturbed.

Many US plant nurseries (and seed sprouting websites, too) experienced very heavy demand during the Spring of 2020, but most have now (end of July) restocked. If you don't want to plant summer produce when it's almost August, you can start by doing some seed sprouting. Use any medium or large-sized glass jar for sprouting, and cover it with hardware cloth (any aerated material), and rinse and drain it daily until the sprouts are ready to eat.

Awesome information. Makes me wonder what was being eaten before modern cultivation. I mean, even where I live, it seems like there would be wild foods to be found. I suppose it would be harder to just stumble across, since the wildlife would likely eat it asap.