Could James and the Giant Peach inspire the future of food?

In the novel by Roald Dahl James and the Giant PeachMagic crystals enable a withered peach tree to grow an impressive, juicy peach the size of a house. How cool would it be, people thought, if we could grow giant fruits in real life—perhaps without spawning giant insect pests or enduring villainous aunties.

By the mid-2030s, botanists had figured out how to do this. Scientists found ways to produce large fruits and vegetables using genetics and improved the James peach: they created crops and trees that produced not just one type, but a variety of delicious and nutritious foods.

Fruit salad “Tree”the tree, which bears several types of fruit and which itself sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl story, was commercially produced in the early 2020s. Grafting has been used for thousands of years to produce hybrid plants, and fruit salad trees are created by grafting branches from one tree, say the russet apple, to a branch from another variety of apple, say the golden delicious. You can add other varieties so that you can grow several different apples on one tree. In 2013, one man made a tree that produced 250 different varieties of apples. Similar trees for fruit salads were made from citrus fruits (lemon, lime, oranges and grapefruits were grown). Another type produced plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots.

And then there were tomatoes – you say pomatos – obtained by grafting potato roots onto the leaves and stem of a tomato plant.

In all of these examples, the hybrid is created from closely related plants. Tomatoes and potatoes, for example, belong to the same genus. Solanumwhich also includes eggplant (or eggplant). Indeed, the potato itself originated from the hybridization of the tomato about 8 million years ago. Thus, using grafting, it is not difficult to obtain a thriving hybrid of closely related plants.

With careful gene editing and plant breeding, by the early 2030s it was possible to create a plant that could grow fruits from different families, resulting in trees such as bananas, citrus fruits, apples and peaches. Farmers and private producers could order the combination that best suited their taste.

Gardeners also had a hand in Brassica oleraceaa species that produces various varieties of cabbage, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. It was relatively easy to create a hybrid that would produce all of these vegetables in different parts of a sprawling hedgerow.

The grafting was fine, but it was labor intensive and expensive as each individual plant had to be custom made by hand. The real breakthrough came in the mid-2030s, when botanical geneticists were able to create hybrid superplants that could be grown from seeds. This meant that many more people had access to the convenience of harvesting multiple crops from a single plant.

PolyPlants, as they became known, heralded a new way of processing crops and food trees. People have become more comfortable with gene editing as they have seen the benefits it can provide. Fruits were created to produce additional nutrients and vitamins. This is based on work done in 2022 tomatoes Designed to produce additional antioxidant pigments called anthocyanins, which prolong life. Other changes made through gene editing allowed PolyPlants to better resist fungal diseases, salt water, drought and insect attack. Root microbiome engineering individual mycorrhizal fungi for each crop component and increased yield and growth.

Large-scale gene editing has become even more important as global temperatures have risen and traditional crops have declined. PolyPlants, designed to survive extreme climates, have helped give food security around the world.

Genome analysis revealed clusters genes affecting the size of the edible component of food plants. Method adapted from grafting made it possible to edit the genes of plants that otherwise eluded direct engineering, such as avocados, coffee and cocoa. These advances have made it possible to create plants that produce oversized fruits.

In honor of Roald Dahl's story, scientists created a peach variety whose fruits were the size of a large suitcase. Traditions arose around huge fruit trees. Celebrations were held when the fruits were ripe and children were treated to delicious giant peaches, cherries and strawberries.

The crops and trees that produced huge, super-nutritious food were not just a treat for the delicacy. They have played a critical role in providing vital food supplies in many parts of the world where food shortages have been a problem and food security a growing risk.

Rowan Hooper is New scientistpodcast editor and author How to spend a trillion dollars: 10 global problems we can actually solve. Follow him on Bluesky @rowhoop.bsky.social In Chronicles of the Future, he explores the imagined history of future inventions and developments.