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Sadly 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
by ry_ry 11y ago
Sadly 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?