Most ancient vegetables would be virtually unrecognizable today. Corn's great-great-grandparent was a type of grass that looks nothing like the giant golden cobs we immediately picture whenever we see that word. Eggplants looked a lot like, well, eggs.
We rounded up the fascinating history behind these vegetables and more.
Ancient maize — which became corn — can be traced back to a wild grass called teosinte.
At the height of summer, there are few vegetables we love more than our gorgeous, golden corn — especially straight off the grill.
But we don't rely on it as a staple food item — which is exactly what it was in Central America about 4,300 years ago, according to Massive Science.
Meso-American farmers selectively domesticated over 50 separate strains of maize — called landraces, which Massive Science likens to dog breeds, only with different varieties of corn. Since it was grown over a broad geographic area, individual farmers coaxed landraces that were specifically adapted to environmental conditions — which is why there is so much variety in traditional landraces today.
But what happened before maize was domesticated? "Based on archaeological evidence and modern DNA evidence, we already know that maize was domesticated in Mexico sometime between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago," Nathan Wales of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen told the BBC.
Ancient teosinte cobs were less than an inch long and only produced around eight rows of kernels — or about half that of modern maize.
Even though you might love a good corn tortilla now — or you might make them yourself — most commercially produced corn tortillas and corn flours are made from homogenized, commercial corn — not traditional landraces. In 2017, a company called Masienda Bodega started making and selling authentic landrace corn tortillas in Whole Foods across the country, according to Civil Eats.
You may know that the tomato and tomatillo are related — but fossils discovered in 2017 indicate that the family dates back at least 52 million years.
The idea of maize as a crop, for which we can thank Meso-American farmers, is pretty common — but the same is also true of tomatoes and tomatillos. As of 2017, scientists found fossils that they named Physalis infinemundi — which means "at the world's end," since they were found at the southern tip of Patagonia in South America, according to the Washington Post.
The fossils date back 52 million years — when a supercontinent cluster connected what are known today as South America, Australia, and Antarctica. Prior to this discovery, scientists had dated tomatillos back only as far as nine to eleven million years, according to the Washington Post.
Tomatoes made it to Europe around the year 1519 but were only grown for ornamental purposes, according to Smithsonian Magazine. By the late 1700s, the tomato as a food item in Europe had a very bad reputation — all because of poorly understood lead poisoning.
At the time, wealthy European households were using pewter plates — which were very high in lead. Tomatoes are very acidic, and when they were served on those pewter platters, they leached large amounts of lead from them, according to Smithsonian magazine. Many people didn't just get very sick — they died.
Thus, most people of the time believed that tomatoes were poisonous— and rumors of the "poison apple" quickly spread.
Meanwhile, in the British North American Colonies, not everyone could make up their minds about tomatoes. Different rumors about green tomato worms that were "poisonous as a rattlesnake" spread, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Some people in the colonies were early adopters, eating tomatoes back in the 1700s. By the 1850s, tomatoes were so popular that associating your other edible crops with them was a valid sales method at markets.
Long before eggplants were emoji, they were actually shaped like eggs — and some varieties still are.
The earliest records of eggplants come from ancient Chinese literature dating to around 59 BC — and also to the Munda people in India, near modern-day Myanmar. There are a variety of names for the same plant across India— which makes it clear that it's been around for an exceptionally long time in the region.
It traveled to Europe via the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century. From there, it slowly spread across Europe and eventually made it to the Americas.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider