>"It's fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago," he told me. In many cases, it's our only chance to peer into the past, since we can't preserve vegetables for hundreds of years.
Depends on the seed. Some seeds have been growen after 2000 years of storage (in what was close to ideal conditions for that seed), but others only last a few years in any storage possible 100 years ago.
I'm sure in most cases the seeds are good enough, but I would also imagine the environment has some effect on vegetable appearance too: qualities of the soil, how they were planted and cared for, qualities of the sunlight, etc. As an extreme example, you can't get cube watermelons just by planting the seeds of another; you need the box to grow it in too.
If people did then yes that's obviously the best way to do that, but an awful lot of these are lost to history now. 500 years in the future we've got seed banks people can pull from
Um ... not even by saving the seeds?