Here's what fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them

Next time you pop an ear of juicy sweet corn on the grill, remember this: Your summertime favorite wasn't always so tasty.

In fact, its predecessor, a wild grass called teosinte, barely resembles the sweet, crunchy vegetable we're now familiar with. And this was the case for many of our fruits and veggies.

So how did we get the produce we have today?

Turns out we've been tweaking their genetics for hundreds of years via selective breeding, whereby farmers select and grow crops with the traits they desire, like juicer fruit, over time.

GMOs involve a similar process, though it's more exact and rapid. Instead of hand-picking these genes over hundreds of years, scientists splice in genes from another organism. And despite all the vitriol they've inspired, the science on GMOs has never been clearer. A new report released Wednesday looking at three decades of research on GE crops found "no evidence" that they "are less safe to eat than conventional food."

Here are some of the foods that looked totally different before we first started growing them to eat:

Wild corn

Flickr/Matt Lavin

Roughly 10,000 years ago, farmers in what is now Mexico noticed that not all of their maize plants were the same. Some were bigger; some tasted better. So they started saving kernels from the plants they favored and planted them for the next season. Thanks to what we now call selective breeding, cobs of maize grew bigger and sweeter over time. 

Natural corn, shown above, was first domesticated in 7,000 BC and was dry like a raw potato, according to an infographic by chemistry teacher James Kennedy.

Modern corn

Flickr/zivkovic

Today, corn is 1,000 times larger than it was 9,000 years ago and much easier to peel and grow. Also, a whopping 6.6% of the vegetable is made up of sugar, compared with just 1.9% in natural corn, according to Kennedy. About half of these changes occurred since the 15th century, when European settlers began cultivating the crop.

Wild eggplant

Flickr/Valentina Storti

Eggplants also weren't always the large, deep purple veggie we know them to be today. Once upon a time, they were white. Some were bright blue. Still others (like those in the photo) were yellow and round. Some of the earliest eggplants were cultivated in China. And early versions of the veggie once had spines where the plant's stem now connects to its flowers.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider