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We have twisted nature for thousands of years to have higher yields and more desirable characteristics Undoubtedly. However, those desirable characteristics we
by lutorm 11y ago
We 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago> Sure, for flavor engineering, but do they do it for raw produce? They do it for QC samples of mass produced food. Perhaps it could be done for raw produce, then?
- SigmundA 11y agoI don't disagree, the lag time for the market to respond to flavor is obviously much higher than something easily measurable like yield. However the solutions seem to revolve around going back to "natural" methods which are anything but, rather than simply making more genetic modifications to get the desired trait or perhaps needing more or different fertilizer. The option is there to utilize the land less efficiently to get the same effect for some characteristics, but we may have to accept at some point feeding people on a modern scale may not be tenable with what is considered more "natural" or "organic" or whatever term is being used to ambiguously describe the techniques that are not natural at all in the dictionary sense.