And you can help!

July 14, 2020 6:49 PM

what did our food look like hundreds of years ago? For a few decades, plant geneticists have studied the historical genetic composition of modern foods in several ways, highlighting certain genetic mutations that were responsible for transformations in appearance. These approaches haven't offered many answers for what some plant-based foods actually looked like (....) So worldwide art collections, the old-time equivalents of the modern-day photograph, might serve as a massive historical database of how modern plant foods have fluctuated in their looks. And they're asking the public to send in what they find.
posted by bq (11 comments total)

This is a great idea. I will take note and try to remember to send them images. It's a fun thing to do with kids as well.
But I'm guessing there will be a big hole between late antiquity and late medieval times - maybe 800 years where people for some reason weren't much interested in how things looked.
posted by mumimor at 9:49 PM on July 14, 2020

The Netherlands and Belgium have well-established histories of both fruit and vegetable breeding and still-life paintings of food, which makes this a perfect project. The first thing I thought of when I saw this was the set of four large paintings in the National Gallery in London, depicting the four elements, as lavish market stalls selling fish (water), fruit and vegetables (earth), poultry and wildfowl (air) and meat (fire, since it needs to be cooked, I suppose). The fish looks pretty much like what you would see today, since most of it isn't farmed, and I don't really know enough about meat to be able to comment on it, but the fruit and veg are pretty variable. Some, like the cauliflower and cabbages, look much like what you would see nowadays (including multi-coloured carrots), but some of the fruit is a bit different,. The strawberries are the tiny wild-type, and the pears look rather small, but the grapes look nicer than modern ones. The colours on some things, like the red cabbage, have faded, but this is a really good overview of what was available to people who could afford it.
posted by Fuchsoid at 12:20 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

Can someone post the link to the actual project? Because CNN is trying to give me cookies with no option of opting out (which is in violation of the GDPR).
posted by antinomia at 12:24 AM on July 15, 2020

If there's a website for the project itself, it's eluding me; but there's another article about it on the Guardian website, which is presumably GDPR-compliant.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 3:05 AM on July 15, 2020

Fascinating, thanks for the read!
posted by NickyP at 5:24 AM on July 15, 2020

I continue to be amazed at what waterlemons used to look like.
posted by giltay at 5:51 AM on July 15, 2020 [7 favorites]

The Guardian article provides this contact info:

To get involved email your photographs of paintings depicting fruit and vegetables together with the artwork’s information and details about the plants it contains to [e-mail]

The CNN piece says they’re working on an app. I wonder whether this might be best added on as a function in iNaturalist/Seek...
posted by progosk at 7:49 AM on July 15, 2020

This could even be done during lockdown, on the internet. Part of one of the courses I teach is collection of data, information and knowledge, and this could be a great challenge. How to find images that contain fruits that are not still lifes with fruit. What sorts of sceneries are likely to have fruits in them? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise is obvious, but what others?
posted by mumimor at 8:21 AM on July 15, 2020

Family portraits of farming gentry? Portraits of the parish worthies with the produce their region boasts of? (guessing). And many of these aren’t going to be grand enough to be online.
posted by clew at 9:49 AM on July 15, 2020

Catalogues are not always very helpful since a painting might have 20 weird-looking carrots on them, [and] the moment there is a frog on there as well, the painting will be labeled as a 'still life with frog,' Grrrr, frogs. Damned show-offs. You don't see small game birds hogging the whole spotlight.
posted by taz at 9:58 AM on July 15, 2020

So all watermelons did not look like that. They get swirly inside based on poor growing conditions. (Swirly watermelon made the round on here a few years ago which is the only reason I know ;-) )

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-renaissance-painting-can-tell-us-about-modern-watermelons-180956155/
posted by affectionateborg at 1:27 PM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]