Seeds.
Potent little packages of genetic material!
You bury them in the ground, and miraculously they grow food — and that food gives you
new seeds, and the circle continues, and you never, ever grow hungry again!
But what about seedless fruits and vegetables?
Is this... genetic modification?!
[MUSIC]
Grapes, watermelon, citrus, cucumbers.
These were foods had seeds in them when I was a kid.
But now, when you go to the grocery store — at least here in the United States — and most of them are seedless.
So… how?
Let me say right off the bat that we’re not dealing with GMOs here -- you know: genetically
modified organisms.
Those are foods whose genetics are manipulated by scientists in ways that can’t occur in nature.
Seedless plants are not common in nature, but they do exist!
It’s called parthenocarpy.
And there's actually a clue in the name!
Where are my Greek scholars?
It comes from “parthnos,” which means virgin.
And karpos, meaning fruit.
Virgin fruit means fruit grown without fertilization.
And this gives you seedless fruit!
Okay, a quick recap on what fertilization actually is: If you think back to almost every
HDIG episode, we discover how farmers bring in bees to help pollinate their fields.
As the bees buzz from plant to plant, they transport pollen and drop it on the female
parts of the flowers, and those fertilized ovaries grow into fruit. And that fruit contains seeds.
Now get this: There ARE plants that can grow fruit without that transfer of pollen… including
certain kinds of cucumbers!
Seedless cucumbers are parthenocarpic -- they can grow fruit without fertilization.
But it’s not all easy peasy…
If you’re a farmer who wants to grow seedless cucumbers, you don’t grow them in an open
field like you do (with) seeded cucumbers, like the ones you saw in our HDIG episode.
You put those parthenocarpic plants in a greenhouse -- you lock ‘em up! [prison key clunk]
IF a pollinator happens to drop some pollen and fertilize a flower, it will grow into
a seeded cucumber — which totally defeats the purpose!
OK, so we’ve got parthenocarpy - an unusual but naturally occurring genetic condition.
Well there’s another one: stenospermocarpy.
Are you with me?
Stenospermocarpy gives us seedless grapes.
This is when a plant IS pollinated and fertilized; seed development begins; but the plant aborts
the process before the seed matures.
That’s why you’ll find tiny, soft ghost like seeds inside your grapes instead of the big, crunchy
bitter ones that you find in seeded varieties.
Now in the case of seedless citrus fruit, farmers are basically outsmarting their trees.
Lots of citrus trees can’t produce fruits with seeds inside of them, unless their flowers are fertilized
with pollen from a genetically different variety.
So, say there are two Cara Cara orange trees standing next to each other, they can’t pollinate each
other and produce fruit with seeds inside.
They’ll produce fruit, but fruit without seeds inside!
See that?
So farmers looking to grow seedless fruit, will grow entire orchards of just one single variety.
And as we saw in our Orange | HDIG episode, that means farmers are actually planting clones.
Clones?!
Breathe -- this is just good old fashioned genetic selection.
See, for millennia, plant breeders have chosen plants for different traits -- like sweetness, or color,
or hardiness -- and they hand-pollinated the plants to create new varieties of their choosing.
In the case of fruit like citrus, grapes, apples, bananas, cuttings are taken from
those new varieties, and those cuttings -- which are basically baby clones -- are planted instead
of a seed to ensure the fruit is exactly what the farmer wants.
I took a deep dive into this in our Apple | HDIG episode.
And you can check out that one and all of the episodes I've mentioned by clicking on the links in the description below.
You know what’s kind of crazy to think about?
For thousands of years we were eating watermelons and grapes and other fruits with seeds.
And just in the last decade or two, the popularization of seedless varieties
has made it actually difficult to find varieties with seeds.
Now I know that’s not the case in many parts of the world — but it is here in the U.S., where,
it seems like, for better or worse, convenience conquers complexity of taste.
That especially goes for seedless watermelon!
But seedless watermelon is a whole other can of worms!
In fact, the process is so unique, I dedicated an entire video to it.
And amazingly, you beautiful nerds really seemed to dig it!
If you haven’t checked it out, click that little banner thing up there.
For everyone else, you’ll want to click the link immediately below this video that says “Become
a TrueFood TV Patron” -- you’ll get exclusive behind the scenes content, and most importantly,
you'll support the growth of this channel.
So we can keep dropping seeds of knowledge for you.