Foods That Used To Be Completely Different

There's lots of talk about GMOs, gluten and trans fats these days, and nowadays people feel like they know more about the food they're eating and where it came from than they did a few decades ago.

But we still don't know a whole lot about how the food we buy at the grocery store got to be the way it looks and tastes today, which is why food history factoids are so delicious.

And once you've learned some fun new facts about your favorite foods you'll have plenty to chew over with your fellow foodies!

See 22 Foods You Didn't Know Used To Be Completely Different here

We dish up more neat food posts at the Neatolicious blog

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A lot of fruit pits, including peach pits, cherry pits, and almonds, contain amygdalin, which reacts with water and certain enzymes to form hydrogen cyanide. It is just a matter of how much is there, and for wild almonds it can be dangerous amounts. A genetic mutation causes sweet almonds to lack most of the amygdalin. Sweet almonds, besides tasting different, are also visually a bit different. That combined ease of distinguishing safe ones (tasting better helps) with the easy of growing almonds from seed means almonds may have been one of the first trees to be domesticated in some places, before grafting was discovered.

Still, the user submitted image lists on Cracked can be pretty hit or miss in general.

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Not sure about a couple of these. The cyanide-almond one is likely completely wrong. As for #2, the declining nutrition of fresh fruits and vegetables, it is due to us eating them far less than ripe rather than having it bred out out of them. Still, sending green tomatoes to wholesalers might be considered an "agricultural practice."

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I'm not surprised about the vegans. Ideologues driven by faith (in veganism) are not the best experts when it comes to foodstuff.

And ketchup can be made with banana. I prefer banana ketchup to the tomato ones. Sweeter flavor, of course.

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I'd always wondered about eggplant, though not enough to actually research it myself. I do think #8, Airline Food in the 1960s, should point out that the airlines were more regulated then. They couldn't compete much on price, so they competed on meals and service. After deregulation the airlines became more competitive, and we found out that most people only care about price, not food or free liquor.

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