Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second.
Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts.
“In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods-strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes-that had the durability to survive millennia.
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