I will admit I am a bit of a fruit snob. I graft and grow heritage and heirloom apple and stone fruit. I don’t have the climate for grapes, besides some concord varieties. I do enjoy local (Eastern WA) Thompson seedless, for the balance of sweet, acid, and crunch. I bought some Cotton Candy grapes and found them to be a tad flaccid and lacking acid, but no shortage of sugar content. Overall kind of a flat one note fruit, probably aptly named.
The breeding is not chemical or genetic as others have noted. Selective breeding and crossbreeding has produced nearly every fruit or vegetable we eat. Every cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, radish, and Cole crop was once a mangy waxy rough textured kale. Every apple was a small golf ball hard fruit on the Northwest slopes of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains of western China and Tajikistan.
The GMO crops we have today are corn, alfalfa, wheat, and soy. Broadly speaking they are engineered to be resistant to herbicides. The problem is they absorb and hold those chemicals in their tissue and it passes up the food chain. I didn’t really think much about it as a serious threat to my health until 12 years ago while on a hunting trip. I had a friend of family that gave me a damage permit to harvest a mule deer doe. They had 100-200 deer every night in their alfalfa field, and it was eaten to the dirt in places. The neighbor had 16” tall lush dark green alfalfa on the other side of a fence feet from theirs. The field never had more than 2 deer in it. We are talking half and full sections. I was curious and asked the farmer and he told me that the deer won’t go in the GMO Roundup Ready alfalfa. Made me realize I might have been backwards on how many legs the “dumb” animals have.
