Question: What modern fruit is the result of an 18th-century French spy mission?
Answer: The strawberry. Though the fruit was already known in France, it wasn’t yet the strawberry we’re familiar with. But in 1712, King Louis XIV sent a French army officer to Chile and Peru to study their military fortifications as an undercover merchant. One day, the officer found a field of massive strawberries, much bigger than he was familiar with, though paler and less sweet. He brought some home, where they were planted in the royal gardens in Versailles and spontaneously cross-pollinated with a neighboring strawberry bush from Virginia. The result was a hardy plant with large, sweet berries, from which all modern commercial strawberries would descend.
