Comment by dredmorbius

There's a world of difference between something fresh off a plant and something ... not fresh out of a (chemical processing) plant, as most processed foods are.

Yes, ag breeding has created foods which are far removed from their ancestors. But get this: effectively none of the foods eaten by humans today existed in anything resembling their current form as little as 10,000 years ago.

Wheat ... was a wild grass occurring in the Mesopotamian valley. Corn was ... teosinte, a small, hard-kerneled Central American plant. Rice was a wild marsh grass found in the Yangtse river valley. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, horses (probably initially hunted for meat, only later exploited for draught), were bred from ancestors only distantly similar to today's major breeds. Apples were wild fruit tree from Turkey which didn't breed true. Etc., etc.

There's an online "tree of life" showing the evolutionary history of plants and animals, and what was shocking to me was the recency of most of humans' major ag and animal foods -- they're literally younger than our species, by far.

That's not to take away entirely from your point. But humans have been relying for much the past few thousand years, and certainly centuries, on foods far removed from their origins.