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Tale of Tasteless Tomatoes: Why Vegetables Do Not Taste Good Anymore
- draw_down 11y agoGoogle cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IzBeeuECSlIJ:calmscience.net/2015/12/11/tale-of-tasteless-tomatoes-why-vegetables-do-not-taste-good-anymore/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IzBeeuE...
- Eric_WVGG 11y agoUnless tomatoes are in season and I’m in some sort of hipster farm-to-table restaurant, I’ll always hold the tomatoes or put them to the side, and inevitably a companion will ask why I don't like tomatoes and I wind up in an argument over whether or not tomatoes are supposed to taste like water. It's dismaying. Do Americans think that the flavor of tomato sauce is an additive? Alton Brown had a good layperson-friendly bit about this in Good Eats but I can't find the episode on YouTube… anyway it worths.
- a3n 11y ago> Do Americans think that the flavor of tomato sauce is an additive? Yes. Everything here is an additive. Tomato sauce is "tomato flavored sauce." Butter is "butter spread." Etc. A bit of an exaggeration, but when you buy packaged food, look at what it's calling itself. If you think you're buying NOUN, but the label says NOUN OTHER, then you're buying OTHER, with flavor or other essential attribute added that may or may not be based on NOUN. Enjoy your cheese spread.
- bcook 11y agolol. Regarding the tenuous connection between tomatoes & ketchup, a friend of mine once posed me the question: "have you ever tasted a tomato that tasted anything like ketchup?". Nope.
- dragontamer 11y agoKetchup is a combination of tomato paste, vinegar, and sugar however. Tomato paste is where you go if you need a pure tomato taste.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoAlong those lines, "properly made" (aka homemade) ketchup tastes only vaguely like the commercial brands. So much so that I can't get my own kids to eat my home made ketchup :-(
- batbomb 11y agoThat's because Heinz is perfection.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Regarding the tenuous connection between tomatoes & ketchup, a friend of mine once posed me the question: "have you ever tasted a tomato that tasted anything like ketchup?". Ketchup evolved as an English approximation of a Southeast Asian pickled-fish-based condiment which ended up using mushrooms and later tomatoes because of availability. Its not really intended to taste like tomatoes, its supposed to use tomatoes and other ingredients to taste like something almost completely unlike tomatoes.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup
- jakub_g 11y agoAnother variation I've seen (in eastern Europe at least) is cheating by omission. They make it look like a NOUN, they wrap it like a NOUN, they name it with some nicely-sounding brand name, and do not write what it is, because it looks like a NOUN, so it must be NOUN, right? In the fineprint there's the explanation: not margarine, but "hydrogenated fat product", not ice cream, but "glacial dessert product", not a chocolate, but "chocolate-like product" etc.
- DrScump 11y agoIn the U.S., a lot of name-brand "ice cream" doesn't even meet the legal definition of ice cream, so they have to call it "frozen dairy dessert"... including most of the Breyer's line (years ago, they were sort of premium). But stay away from Three Twins' Orange Confetti, lest you be lost to addiction. It's sorta like crack, but at least crack doesn't have calories or carbs or fat.
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoAs I was reading the original article, I wondered if the FDA has any regulations about this sort of stuff ("What constitutes a tomato? When is something no longer a tomato?") I did find a bit about naming different types of canned tomatoes[1]. I would have had no idea that there is such a difference between "tomato paste" and "tomato puree" and they even have regulations about how many seeds and peels and such can be in the can. So, even reading all the ingredients and everything on the can, there may be some hidden terminology you may not know about in the way the food is named. Very interesting. [1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=155.191 http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...
- sp332 11y agoEdit: how about this clip? http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/choosing-tomatoes-0157352.html http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/choosing-tomatoes-0157352.... Most likely season 2 episode 11 "Pantry Raid II: Seeing Red" or season 6 episode 6 "Tomato Envy". Food Network takes down most Good Eats episodes on YouTube because they sell some of them for $2 each. Here's a crummy version of Seeing Red that may be deleted soon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNWPtKtKPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNWPtKtKPc and Tomato Envy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq2tifYVEdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq2tifYVEdY I think tomatoes are often added for color instead of flavor.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- phil248 11y agoPeople told me farmer's market tomatoes were better. So I bought them several times and sometimes they were better, sometimes not. Then, I discovered "early girl" tomatoes and they blew my mind. Very limited growing season though.
- amluto 11y agoFood snob mode: there are some growers in some areas that grow "dry-farmed" early girls. It pushes the season much later in the year. The best I've ever tried, by far, are in Palo Alto at the downtown farmer's market. They're available for a fairly long season in the fall.
- fallinghawks 11y agoThis past summer, the local real-estate company dropped off a tomato plant, which they do every year. I planted it and largely forgot about it throughout this dry year, just watering it enough to keep it alive. It grew small (about 2" diameter), very firm, amazingly flavorful tomatoes. I have no doubt the RE company picked whatever plants were cheap and I have no idea what breed it actually was, but the unintentional dry farming made it awesome.
- rorykoehler 11y agoNot entirely related to this pretty spot on article but I have also heard another hypothesis, that, as we get older our taste buds diminish which makes us think things don't taste as good as they used to.
- sosuke 11y agoHmm, I don't think I'd buy that our taste buds diminish that much. I picked up one of those "small farm" tomatoes and it was incredible. Now if you've been a smoker then your taste buds absolutely suffer for it.
- lfam 11y agoI grew up in South Florida which is not a good growing climate for many "classic" North American fruits and vegetables. I didn't understand the popularity of tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, or pears until I moved north and tried them at farmer's markets or from wild growth. I didn't even understand the relationship between the actual foods and the artificial "candy flavor" versions until I tasted the real things. That's how far the commercial varieties have diverged. On the other hand, I miss a lot of the tropical fruits and vegetables that I had growing in my neighborhood down there.
- Loughla 11y agoPeaches. Peaches fresh from the tree. Picked when they're fully ripe and ready. Peaches from Southern Illinois. Oh my god. They are, quite literally, the best things you will ever eat. Calhoun County, Illinois. I suggest you go in August/September just to purchase peaches. It is a backwards, hillbilly part of the country. But god-damn are they good.
- ry_ry 11y agoThis may already be a thing, but rather than focusing on organic-ness or price, I wonder if there is a market for vegetables developing and deliberately focusing their promotion on enhanced nutritional content?
- godshatter 11y agoI would like to see the same thing for beef, eggs, milk, butter, and other dairy products specifically focused on "grass-fed" vs. "grain-fed". I've seen a handful of imported products that make this distinction, but not as many as I thought I would find when I searched for it locally.
- Willson50 11y ago"In the 1940s, a cow produced over 16 pounds of milk per day."
- acveilleux 11y agoA relation of my wife is a canadian dairy farmer. He spends almost more of his time poring over the genetics of his cows, their productivity and exactly which sperm he will buy for her next calves. It's a major upset when a male is born (they're killed after a few days and sold for rendering, probably for dog food.) Any sperm will get a cow pregnant, a 400$ insemination is only worth it for the potential cow sale... That's cause his biggest source of revenue isn't the milk, it's the cows that produce more, fatter milk than any of his neighbors' on less feed per pound of milk. And so they're inbred as hell with a handful of bulls (if that) fathering all of his cows and their mothers for multiple generations. But they sure produce a lot.
- michael_h 11y agoI feel like drinking milk from a herd of consistently inbred cows is one of those things that will seem obviously dumb looking back when something catastrophic happens[0]. [0]I don't know - nationwide distribution of spongiform-milk slurry, aka zombie serum.
- moskie 11y agoDrinking cow's milk at all, inbred or otherwise, will most likely be viewed as a completely ridiculous notion one day.
- DiabloD3 11y agoSome people already view it as a ridiculous notion, so you're not far off.
- clock_tower 11y agoThis is going to sound like trolling, but it isn't meant to be: Why are some people passionately averse to milk? Personally, I've always seen cow's milk as the quintessential drink of Western Christendom: something that Germans, Scots, Englishmen, Scandinavians, Celts (from the Hebrides all the way to Navarre and Galicia), and provincial Frenchmen consume, but that's all but unknown among foreigners -- including the predatory, Viking-descended aristocracies in London and, especially, Paris. (The English upper class proverbially never trusted an adult who drank milk; the French upper class hardly even remembered that it existed, except as a precursor to cheese.) My theory is that those who hate milk see it in the same way as I do, but don't share my fondness for Western Christendom. The old-money "Northeastern establishment" in the United States never quite forgave God for how His Book is fine with slavery; Jews and Germans always did feud, but these days the Jews have very good reason to be frightened when they hear talk of traditional voelkisch German-ness (which in any case never did like them); eastern and southern peoples, not all of whom can consume milk in the first place, might reasonably regard milk as a symbol of a society that was as rich as it was xenophobic. And people born into the old Western order but seeking to escape it -- including most Americans, to some extent or other -- might want to escape its symbols, too. Does this sound about right, or are there other reasons for disliking milk? I can understand personally not drinking it, if you don't have mature lactose tolerance; I can see excellent reasons for disliking industrial dairying with battery farms of miserable, inbred, inadvertently-cannibal cows (I don't touch milk unless it's organic and from humanely-raised cows); but if it isn't for the reasons above, I don't know why people dislike -- indeed, passionately shun and repudiate -- the very idea of drinking milk.
- sandworm101 11y agoThe OP makes many assumption about food, chief among them being that flavor is always a good thing. I also wonder which type of tomato he is buying. Some are designed for size alone. Others (roma+cherry) have much more taste, especially those grown all year in local greenhouses rather than those picked green and shipped in. Even in the depths of a canadian winter, the tomatoes I buy at costco were picked the previous day at a facility a few miles down the road. They taste great. >> Plain yogurt is tasteless. Yogurt's lack of flavor is nothing to do with the milk. "Plain" yogurt is meant to taste as plain as possible so that flavors can be added to it. It's like vodka. The goal is consistency rather than amount of flavor. It's the difference between tasting a food and tasting an ingredient.
- azinman2 11y agoVery high quality dairy has a very nice flavor of its own, as does vodka. I've had very small production half and half in the San Juan islands that tasted exactly like vanilla ice cream. Butter often tastes different in France. I've also been told the Greek yogurt in Greece is completely unlike anything sold in the US and much much better. Edit: I'm in SF and routinely buy local, organic, blahblahblah. I've still had better dairy elsewhere.
- sandworm101 11y agoHigh quality is a matter of opinion. If you are selling yogurt to people as is, then "plain" should have some flavor. But if you are adding things to the yogurt you care more about consistency. Lack of flavour is an easier starting point, as with vodka used to mix drinks.
- michael_h 11y agoIf you are in anything resembling a mid-sized city, you can get 'real' greek yogurt pretty easily in the US. Among the national brands, yeah, they're pretty anemic. The good stuff is halfway to cheese, consistency wise. It should be fresh, and it's easy pie to make at home. I don't know about 'much much better'...maybe just one 'much'.
- ry_ry 11y agoSadly the site is dead, but the gist of it was that modern produce production demands have increased yield and reduced cost dramatically, at the cost of flavour and nutrition - the anecdotal example being watery flavourless tomatoes. Or 'garnish' as they are otherwise known.
- maxerickson 11y agoat the cost of flavour and nutrition The good news is that it isn't necessarily a trade off, it's just that commercial breeders have ignored flavor and nutrition and focused on productivity and suitability for transport. So we might get vegetables that still work well for modern supermarkets while tasting better.
- greeneggs 11y agoHowever, there likely is a tradeoff between taste and nutrition. Nutritious compounds can often have a bitter taste, while sugar is often said to be unhealthy.
- tanker 11y agoI enjoyed your phrase "often said to be unhealthy." I'm glad the nutrition field is willing to admit errors and update guidance. I'm a little disappointed with the high frequency. I did 30 seconds of research, and found out dietitian and nutritionist are not synonyms. Dietitians seem to use nutrition to achieve specific medical or performance outcomes. In that context, it makes sense to have lots of changes as the bleeding edge advances.
- SilasX 11y agoRelatedly, I've always wondered how the commodities markets handle this sort of "Goodhart-style" problem: what counts as a tomato? When they started doing futures and forward contracts for tomatoes, everyone understood them to be "that tasty thing". But then the participants (as expected) game the system, doing the minimum necessary to deliver 5000 "things that count as tomatoes". And so the taste and nutrition drift. Do they have some rigorous definition of when the tomato isn't good enough? Can you define it so that there isn't this drift?
- utternerd 11y agoI prefer my science to be anecdotal, don't you?
- zzzcpan 11y agoRelated: How Tomatoes Lost Their Taste (2012) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/how-tomatoes-lost-their-taste http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/how-tomatoes-lost-the...
- dekhn 11y agoI used to live in Berkeley, CA, and both "alt" groceries (Monterey Market and Berkeley Bowl) sourced wonderfully flavored tomatos- many different kinds, from juicy salad tomatos to beefy paste tomatos. The prices were not higher than the supermarket, and they tasted far better.
- SigmundA 11y agoWild tomatoes are small and unpleasant tasting, doesn't that kinda blow the premise? The modern tomatoes we eat are genetically modified by humans through breeding which we like to call domestication. This genetic modification caused them to be bigger and taste pleasant. My understanding was there was push to breed them to be uniformly red when ripe but this also caused a mutation to make them more bland, this occurred in the 1940's before "modern" genetic engineering, which incidentally no tomatoes currently on the market are engineered that I am aware of. I always think it ironic to blame modern techniques like genetic engineering for all sorts of issues like somehow a cow, chicken, pig, tomato, corn or wheat are somehow "natural", these are all genetically modified organisms that would not exist without human tampering. We have twisted nature for thousands of years to have higher yields and more desirable characteristics, if tomatoes are bland I would imagine we will twist them some more to make them flavorful again if the market demands it, but their "natural" "wild" cousins have never been tasty.
- lutorm 11y agoWe have twisted nature for thousands of years to have higher yields and more desirable characteristics Undoubtedly. However, those desirable characteristics were about more than just yield. In industrial agriculture, however, you can't quantify "taste". You can, however, quantify "yield". So it becomes a case of ruthlessly optimizing for what you can measure, to the detriment of other, more subtle, characteristics.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYou can quantify taste. Not precisely, sure, but taste testers are used in commercial food production.
- dasil003 11y agoSure, for flavor engineering, but do they do it for raw produce? A big part of the problem is that produce is seen as a commodity, and all the economic value is added by using cheap commodity ingredients in a highly tuned industrial process to create the most tasty and addictive food. The incentives are just all misaligned.
- varelse 11y agoDry-farmed tomatoes (of any variety) are my personal favorite. http://www.thekitchn.com/what-are-dryfarmed-tomatoes-126811 http://www.thekitchn.com/what-are-dryfarmed-tomatoes-126811
- manachar 11y agoIt's always interesting to see what happens when something is optimized for the "wrong" metric. No consumer would actually say they want worse tasting tomatoes, but consumers as a whole clearly made that choice by buying only cheap and firm tomatoes. Same with farmers, they didn't want bad tasting tomatoes, they just wanted to make a profit and knew that the market responded positively to tomatoes that were red, firm, ship well, and stayed "good" long enough for the retailers.
- jrochkind1 11y agoSo one of the things going on there is that firmness and redness used to be signs of a good-tasting tomato -- because it was just the right amount of ripe, not under or over. Customers don't normally get to taste tomatoes before they buy them, they have to use firmness and color as a proxy. So they bred tomatoes that can be very firm and very red with almost no relationship to actual ripeness, and taste terrible. In that case, it's more of a trick than customers showing a preference for firmness or color over taste. But you're right, I think, that customers will generally choose cost over taste, or over almost anything else, in the aggregate over the long-term anyway.
- munificent 11y ago> So one of the things going on there is that firmness and redness used to be signs of a good-tasting tomato. Is it that or just that firmness and redness are correct signs of "will last until I get it home from the store and use it for dinner in a few days"?
- jrochkind1 11y ago"last" how? Some would say grocery store tomatoes start out unfit for consumption.
- manachar 11y agoAnother example is the yellow in cheddar cheese. Apparently the yellow-ish color was originally a mark of high-quality milk from grass-fed Jersey and Guernsey cow. Now they use annatto and other spices/dyes to add color to the cheese. Essentially, when the consumer doesn't have complete information they will have to make purchasing decisions based on proxy information. As you note, this can lead trickery from the person selling the product.
- jofer 11y agoIn addition to being bred for yield, there's shippability. One of the biggest reasons tomatoes from the store taste so bad is that they're picked completely green. The second is that the commercial varieties are bred to have a pastier texture and be tougher to stand up to shipping. The third is that tomatoes don't stand up to refrigeration without a change in texture. My uncle grows tomatoes commercially in southeast Tennessee. If you actually let the commercial varieties ripen all the way and don't refridgerate them, they're pretty good. They're better than the anything you can buy at a fancy grocery store. They're not as good as homegrown brandywines, but they're on par some of the popular hybrid varieties, and will beat out any store-bought heirloom (e.g. a store-bought brandywine). However, when any tomato is picked to sell in bulk, they have to be picked completely green. Otherwise they'll be too badly bruised to sell. The "vine ripened" tomatoes you buy in the store just means that they cut off some of the vine along with the green tomatoes. The site is down, so forgive me if I'm pointing out something that's mentioned there. At any rate, in my opinion, commercial tomatoes suffer more from being picked completely green so they'll survive shipping than anything else.
- tgb 11y agoDo you know about canned tomatoes?
- hanniabu 11y agoWhat do you want to know about them?
- jofer 11y agoI'm not 100% sure on this, but my understanding is that commercial canned tomatoes are more likely to be picked ripe. The reason is that canned tomatoes usually come from the leftovers and blemishes. When they pick a field of tomatoes (green), quite a few are left behind due to being too small, strangely shaped, etc. These are usually allowed to ripen. From what I understand, those are what canned tomatoes most often come from, as they're the cheapest. No one cares if a misshaped or bruised tomato gets canned. It will still taste about the same. Therefore, you can ship the tomatoes closer to ripe, as you're not worried about bruising. On a side note, canned tomatoes are actually usually very good if you buy a respectable brand. The bargain brands vary a lot more. Honestly, unless it's late summer and I can get great tomatoes, I make salsa from canned tomatoes instead of fresh. (Note: this is for things where I'd be fire-roasting the fresh tomatoes anyway.)
- alohahacker 11y agoHaving lived in Japan more than 10 years ago, that's the first thing I commented coming back. Why fruits and vegetables were way more delicious there than here. I loved fruits in japan where here its more of a chore when I ate them because I already assumed the bland taste before even biting info it. This makes total sense.
- unexpand 11y agoI always wondered why tomatoes and onions tasted different in some other country. I specially remember the tiny little tomatoes and the tiny little onions. Nothing looked perfect, but it all tasted amazing and I realized when I had the very first bite of my sandwich and salad, it was all flavorful. Glad I know why.
- GnarfGnarf 11y agoSupermarket carrots and other vegetables are also bred to withstand rough mechanical harvesting and not bruise, at the expense of flavour. The solution is to pick tasty breeds of carrots directly at the farm, and store them in a root cellar over winter.
- notalaser 11y agoSo around here, in Elbonia, it's still pretty common for people to grow their own stuff in the countryside. My grandmother still grows her own vegetables and still raises chicken. She doesn't use fertilizer, but the conditions are quite ideal for a lot of vegetables, including -- yes -- tomatoes. The difference is astounding. Simply slicing one or two tomatoes is enough to make my whole kitchen smell like tomatoes. My palate is so accustomed to supermarket chicken that I literally cannot eat the ones she raises. I have to drown the meat in spices -- the flavour is so strong (and pretty different from that of "mass-produced" chicken) that it makes me vomit. Fortunately, I don't have that trouble with her tomatoes. The catch is, indeed, that the yield is fairly low. There's no such thing as more than one crop per year, either -- she has tomatoes throughout the summer, but that's it. The only exception are cherry tomatoes, which will sometimes grow another generation of fruit in early autumn, and they ripen pretty fast, but that's it. Also, the ripening process is fairly slow; by mid-autumn or so, there are still enough unripe tomatoes for her to pickle a few jars. (What, you don't pickle tomatoes when they're green in the States? You have no idea what you're missing!) That being said, their color is pretty uniform. I don't have a picture right now, since they're out of season, but they really look OK, most of them are no different, in terms of look, from what you can see in supermarkets. Sometimes they grow in a somewhat weird shape (e.g. some of them get rather bulgy, but maybe that's a distinct cultivar, I don't know; others look perfectly round) but, if you allow them to ripen, they're pretty uniformly red. However, at that stage they're basically impossible to sell in supermarkets or even at farmers' markets, they'll go bad within days of being picked, even if you refrigerate them. People basically pick them right before a meal (worst case scenario, they'll pick a bunch in the morning so that they can chill in the fridge for an hour or two -- summers are pretty hot here, so if you pick them before lunch, you'll be eating really warm tomatoes). Edit: I've seen someone here claiming that plain yogurt is supposed to be plain. Fuck no. Plain yogurt is so thick, soury and flavourful that, unless you've grown up with it, it's an acquired taste. My grandmother never raised cattle -- I first tasted plain, home-made yogurt at one of her relatives in a remote-ish village when I was 14 or so. I hated it, despite having eaten plain yogurt from the supermarket before, and it took me a whole summer to get accustomed to the taste. It's also incredibly filling, you can't eat more than a bowl.
- ddingus 11y ago
- edw519 11y agoThe delta between a great tomato and a good tomato is nontrivial but insignificant compared to the delta between any tomato and a Coca Cola.
- vanilla-almond 11y agoA lot of tomatoes grown and sold in Europe are also tasteless. In the UK, most supermarket tomatoes are imported from The Netherlands or Spain (two of the largert exporters of tomatoes in Europe). The tomatoes are mostly tasteless, regardless of the variety. Even the organic ones have only a little bit more flavour. So tasteless tomatoes aren't just an American phenomenon, they are common in Europe too. That's what modern, mass-procuded agriculture gives us: tasteless, low-cost produce all-year round (because price mostly trumps other factors for many, if not most, consumers)
- vanilla-almond 11y agoA lot of tomatoes grown and sold in Europe are also tasteless. In the UK, most supermarket tomatoes are imported from The Netherlands or Spain (two of the largert exporters of tomatoes in Europe). The tomatoes are mostly tasteless, regardless of the variety. Even the organic ones have only a little bit more flavour. So tasteless tomatoes aren't just an American phenomenon, they are common in Europe too.
- scrumper 11y agoWell this is prima facie bad, but actually we're not in such a terrible spot as a society: the bulk of supermarket chicken and beef might be corn-fed, bland, watery mush these days, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than it ever used to be, and that means that a wider segment of the population can afford reasonably good meat on a regular basis. Better nutrition means healthier kids who can do better in school, and you know the rest. The stuff isn't bad, it's just not as good as it used to be. But neither is it as exclusive as it used to be either. Those of us with more money still have the option to buy tasty, grass-fed beef steaks from niche producers. It takes more effort of course. Quite often I find that arguments against bland, cheap, tasteless food are really about unrealistic people expecting cheapness, high quality, and great convenience. You can't have all three!
- mirekrusin 11y agoIt's true but it still means we could do better by trying to optimise for nutrition value as well - which seems to somehow hidden from us. You often don't taste or see nutrition value. Also what does it mean for food recommendation if one strawberry has completely different vitamins/minerals/etc than the other one? Eating strawberry A and B means completely different things now. "One fruit a day" or "One cheap fruit a day + supplement pill"?
- scrumper 11y agoWell, we've optimized for yield (=> cost) exclusively. Taste and nutritional value are other axes. In a way you're saying the same thing as the article - that it's a shame to focus only on yield. To answer your question, I think its important to first understand whether the nutritional gap between zero strawberries and modern strawberries is much greater than that between modern strawberries and old-fashioned low yield tasty strawberries. My opinion (worth nothing of course) is that it's better to have some fruit than no fruit, and high yield, cheap produce allows that.
- chadcmulligan 11y agoI remember when I was a kid (Back in my day :-)) roast chicken was an expensive Sunday treat. Then at some time they become really cheap and you could eat chicken whenever you wanted. Now no one bothers roasting their own chickens, they're all cooked for you.
- cfcef 11y agoIt always astonishes me to see graphs of yields for all these different plants and animals skyrocketing upwards under the pressure of selection on additive genetic variation, despite their totally different biologies, lifecycles, and even optimizing for different things (egg vs milk vs muscle).
- softyeti 11y ago100 years ago, calories and yield were more important than nutrition. In some areas, just getting enough calories is obviously more important. General nutrition information is getting better every year, and I think in the next 5-10 years, there will be a mainstream discussion over this issue.
- kchoudhu 11y agoThere was a book about this: Tomatoland. It's depressing in the extreme.
- marshray 11y agoPerhaps this is an inevitable result of commoditization, i.e., futures contracts on bushels of corn on commodity markets.
- Vivtek 11y agoAmerican yogurt is bland because if you let it ferment all the way it's got a kick that Americans tend not to like. Has very little to do with the milk, and everything to do with lactic acid.
- kumarski 11y agoOf the 600,000 food items currently in the American grocery store, 80% of them have added sugar, the statistics get worse as you look at restaurant menus.
- rdlecler1 11y agoTo be clear, the author pins this on GMO, but the article he cites mentions no such thing.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- khattam 11y agoWhat is this calm science bullshit that keeps popping up here? This is yet another retarded opinion post with nothing to back their claims. So fertilisers are bad? And lack of nutrients in food is bad too? If there is not much nutrient in the fruits, it only shows that enough fertilisation was NOT done to the soil. It is absolutely possible to increase yield while maintaining nutrient contents. It is done by fertilisation with increasing yields. Unfortunately, people don't check the nutrient contents while purchasing fruits and vegetables. So, investing in more fertilisation does not give them return of investment. The ONLY thing customers care about is looks. So, the producers are optimising for looks and looks alone. It is possible to optimise for taste and nutrition. But when there are more easy and more retarded ways to sell products like calling them "natural" or "organic" or "non-GMO". As long as retarded cuntards like the author are alive and purchasing such products, this is not going to change. The world will just have to wait for these imbeciles to die out and new generations of intelligent people replace them.