About shelf life:
There's this weird little apple tree, Prime Rouge. Every two years, he's choke full (the other empty) of perfectly formed, perfectly red apples, optical flaws are rare. They are already edible in summer but get really succulent taste and a white flesh about two months later. The best apple breed i know, in texture, taste and look.

Buut they only keep about two months max, unlike the other breeds you have in your supermarket.

Which is why until modern farming some of the most nutritionally balanced people's were hunter gatherers and pastoralists. The big advantage of farming vs ranching or pastoralism is that you can feed a lot of people for relatively little work, this rule of thumb is still true it's just that we can now do it on such a massive scale that a lot of the downsides have simply been overwhelmed.

Until a disease pops up, that targets your only crop. Example A: bananas.

Yeah, I pick some every year. Also cherry plums grow quite a bit near me, along with some apple trees and loads of sloes.

Just to be clear, you mean blackcurrants, yes? Blackberry means something quite different, at least over here.

We do both. The problem is corporations and stupid people. See Monsanto, the non-GMO push and the results of golden rice or similar.

Hi, I'm engaged to someone who studies chickpea and other legumes. Shitloads of money goes into agriculture every year and from my understanding, what you're describing is being done by some brilliant people (I'm a bit biased). However there's so many concerns around GMOs doing damage to the environment that it is tightly regulated. Doubly also, Americans don't have the same ready access to grocery stores that other first world countries have.

Plus the equivalent of flat earthers exist that believe that GMOs will kill us all and we need to go back to eating only what nature created (somewhat hyperbole, there are valid concerns but people have been irrational).

An example is that chickpea and other legumes reintroduce nitrogen into soil after the soil loses vitality, which makes chickpea a good intermediate crop that can be grown in between others. Its high in nutrients and has good yield. So yeah, stop eating corn and eat legumes/chickpea/hummus.

(I'm not the molecular biologist so if I got stuff wrong, sorry, I will pay more attention when my partner speaks)

Im not geneticist, but i grew up on a farm. I always grind my teeth when people talk about miragle plants with high yields.

The plants need to get their energy and nutritions from somewhere. If you just create gmo plant that can absorb nutrition better from soil it also means you need to fertilize that soil that much more and make the crop rotation that much faster, or risk making the fields arid.

But plants that survive larger temperature shifts, more extreme weathers and pest might be necessary for us in the not so far future. Lets just hope in the future those are used for humanitys betterment and not making rich richer.