So if most modern day fruits have been so selectively bred that they cannot produce a plant from there own fruit, how are seeds for these plants attained?
In: Biology
It’s not MOST fruit, it’s some fruits. But a lot of them can be grown from cuttings, pups / suckers, or from grafting on to another plant
A large amount of fruit we eat is actually ‘cloned’ rather than grown from seed.
If you use seeds to grow crops, every seed is different, and there is a large chance that the result will be different each time.
For fruits in particular, there are a lot of traits we don’t want to leave to chance – sweetness, size, speed of growth, seedlessness, etc.
So instead we find one that we like, occurring by random chance, like a mutant seedless, sweet banana tree. We then take little pieces of that one plant, and grow them into more, identical plants. One effective method is called grafting, which is basically where you stick a branch of the plant you like on one you don’t care about. This franken-tree is much faster than trying to grow a whole new tree of the one you like – you can skip on growing roots and stem etc.
In this way, you can be sure that every banana you eat is identical and seedless and every pink lady apple tastes about the same, since they are literally genetically identical.
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