I grew up without pluots.

I know that is hard for people born after 1990 to imagine. What’s more, I didn’t even know I needed a pluot. I didn’t feel deprived. I didn’t long for pluots. When spring arrived, I didn’t live in tormented anticipation of the arrival of the first pluots of the season from California.

Of course, I was not (as some readers have suggested) completely ignorant. I was vaguely aware of the pluot’s great-grandfather, the plumcot, invented more than 120 years ago by Luther Burbank. A California botanist, Burbank was famous for cross-breeding a variety of plants to produce hybrid fruits and vegetables. The plumcot was one of them.

In the 1890s, Burbank forced plums and apricots to — you know — in the words of the Bible, “become one.” (Sorry to be so graphic in a family newspaper.) The progeny of this union was a 50-percent-plum, 50-percent-apricot fruit he called a plumcot.

Burbank believed people like plums mainly for their sweet flavor but are put off by a plum’s overly soft, squishy feeling on the consumer’s tongue. The apricot part was there to correct the bad texture.

Be that as it may, few people bought the hybrid fruit and when Burbank died in 1926, his dream of America’s “amber waves of grain” being replaced by “perpetual pecks of plumcots” died with him.

However, all was not lost. That same year — hundreds of miles away in the amber fields of Nebraska — a child destined to save the plumcot was being born. His name is Floyd Zaiger.

Floyd, now 93, is the inventor of the pluot — a trademarked variation of the plumcot. He started developing the pluot in the 1980s — cross pollinating plums and apricots by hand until he had the 75 percent plum, 25 percent apricot mix that he believed to be correct in both taste and texture. His new fruit was first sold just in farmers markets around California (where he moved after college), but by the early 2000s the pluot was in supermarkets coast to coast.

Could the human race have survived without pluots? Could we have gone on ignorantly eating plums and apricots — content with “what is” rather than longing for “what could be”? I doubt it. Humans seem to be programmed always to seek a better (or at least a different) fruit.

Contentment — peace with the world as it is — does not appear to be a human trait. Our species has a contentment span about as long as the time it takes for the smell of a new car to slip out the windows.

I recall the feeling of exhilaration that came in the package with my first cellphone.

I was unplugged. I was free. No more wires connecting me to the walls of my house. But the excitement faded — requiring me to get a newer model with texting. Then came cellphone interface with email — and the internet and video text and FaceTime and Marco Polo and Twitter and Facebook and GPS and Google.

I now nostalgically recall how free I once was with my rotary-dial telephone plugged into the wall, offering nothing but an occasional chat with my sisters between calls from telemarketers.

Meanwhile, pluot progress goes on. I am told one version has been “backcrossed” (sort of plant incest) to produce a 60-40 combination of the two fruits for an even better taste. I suspect a time might come when all this backcrossing will produce a 55-45 or a 65-35 pluot — or even a 25-75 pluot for those who prefer texture to taste.

In our world of escalating discontent, I wonder where the pluot will take me. I fear I might someday long for just a nice plum, only to find no such fruit exists.

Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. Send comments to [email protected].