Plumalmondterine

My one boss is involved in this big peach breeding project that's been running for, I think, decades. He's responsible for disease screening assays on thousands of fruits from different crosses that are produced each summer. One of the universal benefits of working in an ag lab is that we get lots of leftovers every week.

This week's peaches were pretty interesting. A bunch of them looked like normal nectarines, but when you bit into them, they tasted more like plums and had deep red-purple flesh. The skin was a little rubbery like a plum too. We thought this was pretty remarkable until we got down to the pit. There was an almond inside! It was like a fruit that came with a dessert at the end!

This week's peaches turned out to be hybrids between peach and almond trees (all three of these trees are very closely related to each other, in the genus Prunus - along with apricots and cherries). This got me thinking about the extent to which our food supply is made up of completely artificially-selected genetic freaks. Much of what we eat barely resembles any plant you could find growing wild out in the woods. Traditional breeding techniques have produced varieties far more bizarre and "unnatural" than anything so far engineered with molecular biology techniques. One day that won't be true, but currently our genetic engineering is pretty simplistic.

It's kinda funny that the vast majority of people are much more concerned about genetic engineering than traditional breeding right now despite the safety record of GMOs, which is arguably better. This is completely understandable. I think it's a really good example of how common sense intuition often turns out to be a pretty unreliable method of divining reality. People were really scared of vaccines when they were invented too. This was another technology that sounds like a really terrible idea at first, but turns out to be an invaluable tool when you have the nitty gritty down. These are both normal first reactions for rational people, I think. At least in comparison to more far-out ideas like "intuiting."

Intuiting is a term that some mycophiles have used to describe the putative (and false!) idea that humans can determine if a wild mushroom is poisonous or edible by their impression of it. I guess some people are really eager to find shortcuts around such boring pursuits as scholarship. Why study which potential foods will kill you if you think you can just believe you have an innate ability to sense if something is "good" or "bad" for you? The naive idea that the world is split into dialectic opposites of black and white points toward the gray.

There's a lot of subtle variation in the botanical world. Sometimes single species of fungi or plants exhibit huge ranges in concentrations of potentially poisonous or toxic chemicals. Wild almonds are toxic because they produce cyanide when broken. It's thought that domesticated almonds (which obviously don't produce cyanide) are descended from a mutant wild almond that failed to produce cyanide.

I don't think the metabolic pathways and regulation for cyanide production are really known in Prunus. When my friend who works in an almond lab heard that me and my lab mate had tasted the apparent peach almond he was a little alarmed. Apparently this kind of haywire genetic mixing happens a lot in Prunus species and it's happened before that a fruit is produced that looks like chimera of a few different fruits that we think of as distinct.

I still think this would be a great variety for the supermarket or farmer's market. It's a hell of a lot better than a "Grapple" at any rate. In the end, with breeding or GMOs, it all comes down to empirical testing. You can't always predict whether something is a good idea just based on experience or established theories. New foods and new versions of old foods just need to have an eye kept on them to make sure no unexpected poisons or other hazards creep in.

Do this, and all this new fruit will need is a name.