I saw a youtube video comparing many of the fruits and vegetables we eat today to what we ate a few hundred years ago. It was amazing. Many of them were mere shadows of what we now enjoy, some barely edible.
I can imagine, if the Lord waits, some amazingly tasty animals being developed. Heck, look at the kind of beef we’ve enjoyed the last century compared to the old stuff (e.g. longhorn cattle). No genetic engineering involved. Just breeding.
Apples today aren’t the apples of 1800’s...................
Breeding *is* genetic engineering. *Every* food item that we grow that does not look like its wild counterpart has different genes than the wildtype counterpart. The difference is that with the use of enzymes (which occur naturally), we can target the specific gene we want to change, while in the past, breeders tried to target those same genes in a very unfocused way by selectively breeding the plants or animals that had the desired genes (expressed as "traits") and discarding the ones that didn't have them.
In this case, a control region of a gene involved in muscle growth was selectively edited to cause the muscles to grow larger. This exact same mutation arose naturally in cows, and study of the cows allowed scientists to determine what the mutation is so that they could cause the same mutation in other animals.
Several years ago, I saw a scientific research article detailing the introduction of this mutation into mice. For illustration, the researchers had skinned two mice, one normal and one with the mutation, and photographed them to show the difference in muscle mass and tone. I have to say that the muscular mouse actually looked like it would be pretty tasty if it was slathered with barbecue sauce and grilled. No, I have never tasted mouse.
That first guy who saw that little, red, pea-sized fruit of a toxic nightshade and asked, “I wonder if that tastes good?”
I want to shake his hand.
“...the fruits and vegetables we eat today to what we ate a few hundred years ago. It was amazing. Many of them were mere shadows of what we now enjoy, some barely edible.”
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In the span of few years, the former sweet *mini-peppers* have grown from the size/shape of most hot varieties to actual small variants of the larger 5-lobed sweet peppers. The ones I bought a few days ago are only about 1/3 the size of normal full-sized sweet, colored peppers and are shaped like the large, traditional ones.
Same with Campari *cocktail* tomatoes. They used to be about 2x the size of a large cherry tomato. Some in my last box were actually closer in size to a small 4th-of-July tomato.