Science experimentation in modifying living things has in no realm of life had more effect upon products than in fruit-bearing vegetation. Cultivation is always an effort to improve or refine a product found wild, or by combination of two to produce a third for variety or to secure together only the desirable qualities of each. Grafting and cross-fertilizing are used to do this. In cultivation two efforts are made, namely, to decrease the cellulose in fruits and to improve flavor.

Some foods are palatable both wild and cultivated. This is true of strawberries, though wild differ from cultivated. Mountain cranberries are more palatable and delicate than those of the low-lands bog-cultivated. But by cultivation only are some foods brought into form to render them acceptable human foods. Apples untended return to a wild state that is a stage in their development below the level where they became a desirable addition to the diet of humanity.

Seedless foods are the opposite extreme of wild. The latter are self-grown and bear the seeds that reproduce. Human-grown fruits are cultivated for human food. They are controlled in their growth, so far as control can be exercised, for their improvement as human foods. A fruit without seeds has in it what otherwise would have gone into making seeds or it is in the more tender, less mature stage before seeds form. Thus cultivated seedless fruits are usually more delicate and may be more nutritious too. Sometimes, however, the loss of naturalness in such forced growth is a loss of vital quality. But usually the fruit is preferable as food, as are seedless oranges.

Cultivation of fruit has greatly increased of late years, due to the greater importance attached to it as food and to development of regions especially suited by soil and climate to its growth, combined with extension of transportation facilities.