<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > preface</h1>
China since ancient times is a "foodie country", no matter what dish or meat, can be omnipotent Chinese into a delicious dish, to now is the development of eight major cuisines, cooking methods are more diverse, in addition to our daily life often used in frying, frying, boiling, steaming, as well as pickling, mixing, frying, stewing, burning and so on a total of 26 kinds of cooking techniques, giving us a wealth of gastronomic characteristics.
Of course, in addition to these technical things, food ingredients are also an indispensable part of our foodie country. China has always been a big agricultural country, and has continuously introduced rich food crops from abroad, and the earliest crops introduced are wheat.
Archaeology has found that wheat appeared in the Two Rivers Basin more than 10,000 years ago, domesticated by local humans from the wild, and there are records of wheat on China's oracle bones. Therefore, it can be explained that wheat was introduced long before the development of our civilization.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, because of the increase in population and political stability, they began to vigorously introduce crops to the outside world, so more than 20 kinds of crops in the Americas entered China through different ways and routes, such as corn, tomatoes, potatoes, etc., and finally became a very common agricultural product in China.
However, now, when many people of the older generation taste the tomato, they think that it is not as good as when they were young.
Their memory still has the taste of the young self-eating sand tomatoes, when the tomato skin was thin and thick, the juice was rich, and one bite down and sucked in the sweet juice could suck the whole tomato down. Today's tomatoes are not as delicious as they used to be, why is that?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="19" >Why tomatoes are not as delicious as before? </h1>
In the past, most of the tomatoes were sand tomatoes, thin skin, juicy, sandy and sweet, why are now tomatoes no longer soft and rotten, but hard and hard, and some even "angular"?
Shi Jun, a doctor of botany, believes that this is because of the texture of the tomato itself, which has led to changes in the human tomato industry. Sarcoa tomatoes are delicious, but it has a thin skin and a lot of meat, can't help bumping, nor is it resistant to putting, and it is not suitable for long-distance transportation, and can only be sold in a short range.
If transported over long distances, such as from Yunnan to Beijing, these sand tomatoes may be damaged and turned into a pool of mud on the way. With the development of society, more and more people come to the city, the demand for vegetables in urban areas is increasing, and the vegetables grown in nearby villages and towns can no longer meet the needs of urban residents, and can only be purchased farther away.
In order to avoid ripe tomatoes from spoiling before they are sold, sellers tend to pick some tomatoes that are not yet ripe, which usually does not taste good. Some scientists are also conducting various experimental studies, hoping to get tomatoes that can be transported remotely, and in 1994 the United States developed a tomato variety called "Shaffer".
In 1997, China also developed the "Huafan No. 1", which is also the first genetically modified agricultural product in China to obtain the approval of trading, and to achieve slower ripening time of tomatoes by inhibiting the synthesis of some special proteins in tomatoes.
However, this genetically modified tomato has also withdrawn from the market because of the slight disadvantage of taste, and the emergence of large fruit types and hard fruit types. Although the hard skin tomatoes have a bad taste, they are convenient for transportation, which has become the first choice for more and more merchants.
The change of tomatoes from soft to hard, is it the conscious creation of human beings, or the impetus of plants?
Shi Jun believes that there is actually a two-way influence between us and plants, and even to a certain extent, plants are always dominating the development of our human crops, such as human planting crops, it seems that humans control the survival and growth of plants, but in fact, we are making more adaptable choices to plants according to the soil, nutrients, living environment and other conditions required by plants.
They water them when they lack water, fertilize them when they lack fertilizer, plant them in fertile land if they like fertile soil, and plant in the sand if they like sand, which is actually we are dominated by plants.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" > human skin color change because of plants? </h1>
Human skin color has also been a hot topic for scientists, and a paper in the journal Science in early years said that the whitening of European skin occurred about 5300 to 6000 years ago, while a related paper published in 2012 showed that European skin changed between 11,000 and 19,000 years ago.
Either way, it was because Europeans at that time began to grow crops from the era of hunting wild fruits and became weather-dependent farmers. This also leads to the monolithicization of food, so that these people are extremely deficient in vitamin D, and humans can usually obtain this element by sun exposure, but black skin is not sensitive to sunlight.
Vitamin D for the human body, affects human development, especially bone growth, in order to get enough vitamin D, these European farmers began to change their skin color, so that the skin color becomes lighter, so as to obtain vitamin D.
Shi Jun said that the "culprit" of the change in human skin color is because of the grain "gang" headed by wheat, because of the monolithicization of food caused by farming, and thus malnutrition.
He believes that the influence of plants on human beings is far beyond imagination, not only skin color, but also cultural, social, economic and other aspects, and even human appearance, teeth and vision are determined by plants.
For example, humans use fire to process food, in the early years we all think that roasted or cooked food is to facilitate digestion and absorption, but Shi Jun found through research that in fact, many meats can be chewed and swallowed by humans at that time before being heated with fire, and even in some special cases, cooked meat does not have raw meat with nutrients needed by humans.
So why do humans use fire to heat food? Shi Jun believes that this is because the flame can break down the toxins in the plant and can be better eaten by people.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="66" > conclusion</h1>
Through the study of human evolutionary processes, Shi Jun found that plants have a very important role in human evolution and upright walking, plants and humans are actually two-way influences, and now humans are also changing plants through technology, such as hybridization and transgenics, and artificially obtaining plants that are more in line with human society.
Who is in charge of whom between us and the plants is actually not a very important question, only harmonious coexistence and common development can we survive on the earth for a long time.