5 Ways Fruit and Vegetables Have Changed Over Centuries

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A 17-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi.

Does a sliced watermelon in a mid-17th century Italian painting reveal how breeding and genetic modification have altered food’s physical properties over hundreds of years? That’s the claim of a Vox article, which draws on University of Wisconsin research.

Whether the painted watermelon “offers a glimpse of a time before breeding changed the fruit forever” as advertised is debatable. There isn’t a ton of research on the subject, and some artwork even contradicts Vox’s watermelon claim; for example, an earlier French painting from the National Gallery of Art portrays rather modern-looking watermelons.

But vegetable and fruit variations depicted in famous works of art — particularly those by Dutch artists — probably did indeed exist. Arthur Wheelock, the National Gallery’s curator of northern baroque paintings said that realism was very important to 17th-century Dutch artists, as it was accurately portraying “the textural qualities of the fruits and vegetables.”

Renaissance watermelons aside, here are five other examples of how famous art documents the changing appearance of fruits and vegetables over centuries.

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s “Basket of Fruits.” Click here for a larger version.

1. Pre-Pesticide Imperfections on Produce

Back before the invention of modern pesticides, imperfect fruit and vegetables were the norm. Consider the apple, peach, grapes, and figs in Caravaggio’s 1596 still-life “Basket of Fruit,” which are all past their prime.

“Only the tart quince seems to be holding firm,” wrote Polyxeni Potte in a 2003 Emerging Infectious Diseases article about the painting. “Soft and lusterless, the apple is pockmarked and flawed. The grapes hang heavy, their translucent skin spotted and brown against the plump figs. The leaves, colors fading, edges curling and snarled, are brittle and crinkly.”

That decay was par for the Renaissance course, said John Varriano, a Mount Holyoke College professor emeritus of art and author of Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. “You wouldn’t have gone to a market in Rome in 1600 and found the perfect peach. Now, of course, you wouldn’t buy a peach unless it was perfect,” he said. “The way a fruit would have looked in the 17th century would be more like the way Caravaggio painted fruit, which has insect predations visible upon it, wormholes, rot, and so forth.”

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Osias Beert’s “Still Life With Artichoke.” Click here for a larger version.

2. Tiny Tomatoes

Tomatoes were likely yellow when they first arrived in Europe from the New World, but have undergone “huge changes” over the years, said Joe Masabni, a vegetable specialist in Texas A&M’s horticultural sciences department. Earlier varieties were “small, kind of like a cherry tomato,” he added. “Some of them were even darker red, so they looked blackish.”

In Osias Beet’s “Still Life With Artichoke,” painted between 1580 and 1624, note the small size of the tomatoes on the far right.

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Pieter Aertsen’s “The Vegetable Seller,” completed in 1567. Click here for a larger version.

3. White Carrots

Bugs Bunny’s ancestors wouldn’t have been munching on orange carrots as they outwitted medieval Elmer Fudds. That hue became the norm sometime in the 16th or 17th centuries, said Peter Rose, co-author of Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in 17th-century Dutch Art and Life. A Dutch agricultural university has traced the earliest appearances of orange carrots to that period, she says, adding that some experts think they were bred to honor the Dutch House of Orange.

“Carrots before that were white, and looked like parsnips, or red, and some even dark,” she said, noting that she’d seen such carrots for sale at some modern grocery stores. “They were saying that it was like a new thing, when actually they were old,” Rose said.

In Pieter Aertsen’s “The Vegetable Seller” (1567), both orange and white carrots appear. A 2011 article in an International Society for Horticultural Science publication noted that the former “probably arrived from mutations of yellow forms, and then from human selection, commonly thought to be originated in the Netherlands.”

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Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Summer.” Click here for a larger version.

4. White Eggplants

Eggplants probably arrived in Europe via merchants from South Asia, and they were small and white at first. “Most people have no idea why it’s called an eggplant,” said Harry Rand, a senior curator at the National Museum of American History. But he knows: “The small ones look like eggs.”

Before the purple variety was bred (as one sees, for example, in an 1893-4 Paul Cézanne painting), the more egg-like eggplants appear in artwork, as in “Summer” (1563) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In the painting, a portrait composed of various foods, a white eggplant makes up part of the figure’s neck.

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Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus.” Click here for a larger version.

5. Watered-Down Wine

O.K., you got us — wine isn’t a fruit or vegetable, but it is made with grapes. And in the Middle Ages, it was hardly ever consumed straight.

“When wine in the pre-modern period was served, it was always mixed with water,” Varriano said. In Caravaggio’s 1601 “Supper at Emmaus,” a carafe of wine sits alongside a water pitcher. “Very few people except pure alcoholics drank wine straight,” Varriano said.

More delectable backstories:

The Barely Legal History of the Ice Cream Sundae

A Crash Course in Tiki History and Its Classic Cocktails

Take the Cannoli: One Pastry’s Rise From Sicilian Treat to Iconic Dessert