What humans did to teosinte to get maize is like what nature did to mammals to get whales.
[curious]
[checks wiki]
Holy shit
That’s some quality fucking selective breeding
Same thing to pretty much any vegetable/fruit. I think the closest from the wild we eat are forest strawberries and forest mushrooms, everything else is thousands of years of selection to become those gorgeous packs of nutriments.
Not cabbage. Nobody would ever think to turn cabbage into anything other than what it naturally is. Absolutely nobody. Especially not the Romans. /uj
“Wild” strawberries are probably also not very wild but highly contaminated with cultured strains through cross polination
Completely true, except for one single type.
Weat domesticated us, not the other way round.
The thousands of years process that humans took part in to domesticate animals to eat and generate food was natural.
The way we’ve industrialized the system to process millions of animals at a time using growth hormones, antibiotics, medications, genetic engineering, machinery, automation and employing thousands of people as literal slave labor to do the work is what is unnatural.
employing thousands of people as literal slave labor to do the work is what is unnatural.
Bruh, I have really bad news for you about the past.
Agreed but there are more slaves alive today than there ever was in human history … how natural is that?
About as natural as there being more human beings alive today than there ever was in human history, and the definition of slave being much broader to draw attention to the injustice that we could very easily stop if we put the resources to it.
Proportionally, less than 1% of people are slaves under this expanded, non-chattel slavery definition, which is considerably smaller than just about every major pre-modern polity’s proportion of actual chattel slaves. And most of those under those regimes of slavery are not exactly the same ones doing genetic engineering on crops.
Usually people consider these thousands of years as what differentiates nature and culture (with one of its first form being agriculture).
Modernity sped up this differentiation from nature and made it unsustainable, but it was already not nature anymore when we started, at least regarding the rules of selection.
