7 Fruits and Veggies That Used to Look a Whole Lot Different

You walk through the produce section of your supermarket and everything looks so familiar. But the fruits and vegetables you see bear no resemblance to their ancestors from thousands of years ago. Most of them don't taste the same either.

Credit our forefathers who wanted bigger, tastier, and more attractive food. We talk a lot about GMOs these days, but selective breeding has been around for a while—thousands of years even.

Here are seven fruits and vegetables as they look today and a peek at what they looked like many years ago.

Corn

Corn is everywhere, especially in the summertime. That doesn't mean we know exactly where it came from. Its biological beginnings have long been considered a mystery.

Nevertheless, some scientists eventually linked maize to a Mexican grass called teosinte that has skinny ears with just a few dozen kernels inside a hard casing.

George W. Beadle, a graduate student at Cornell University, ultimately found that maize and teosinte had similar chromosomes, and he also was able to get teosinte kernels to pop. Beadle concluded the two plants were closely related (and later went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work in genetics).

Watermelon

Another summer favorite, watermelon has been around for millennia. Archaeologists found watermelon seeds at a 5,000-year-old settlement in Libya. Paintings of watermelons (as well as actual watermelon seeds) have been discovered in Egyptian tombs built more than 4,000 years ago, including the tomb of King Tut.

Early watermelons likely didn't have the popular red flesh we know today. They were paler with less flesh and more seeds.

Banana

A 2011 study looked at the evolution of the popular, familiar yellow banana. It analyzed multidisciplinary findings from archaeology, genetics, and linguistics to figure out when and where bananas came from.

The findings? Modern bananas evolved from two wild varieties: Musa acuminata, which is a tall plant with small pods bred to produce seedless fruit (and native to Southern Asia), and the heartier Musa balbisiana, which had hard, large seeds. That wouldn't make it so easy to slice over your breakfast cereal.

Carrot

Bright orange and beloved by rabbits, horses, and even small children, carrots are easy to grow and have been around for quite a while. They just didn't resemble their current form.

Historians believe the ancient Greeks and Romans grew carrots. Those early plants were very thin and either an off-white or purple color. They typically had a forked root, like today's wild carrots.

Apple

The modern apple's ancestor looks relatively similar to what we find in supermarkets today. But the taste has certainly evolved over the years.

Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and China. Research has shown that this fruit, also called the Asian wild apple, is one of the main forefathers of our domesticated apple. It's small and sour, unlike the sweet apples we eat today.

Tomato

There are many varieties of tomato in our gardens today, but historically people weren't so quick to eat this interesting fruit—which some consider a vegetable.

Early incarnations of the plant had tiny green or yellow fruit. It was used in cooking by the Aztecs, and later explorers brought the tomato back to Spain and Italy.

Although now a staple in those countries, the tomato in the 1700s was feared and nicknamed "poison apple" because people thought aristocrats died after eating them. But it turned out it was the acidity in tomatoes that leached lead from fancy pewter plates and thereby caused lead poisoning.

Eggplant

Now known for their deep aubergine color, historically eggplants have had several hues including white, yellow, azure, and purple. The English name "eggplant" comes from the fact that the plants were often white and round. Some plants even had spines.

Sanskrit documents from as early as 300 B.C.E. suggest the eggplant was cultivated in antiquity and revered through various names, such as shakasreshta, meaning "excellent vegetable.