Shocking reading, even for me

The Dorito Effect:
The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor 

by Mark Schatzker

Absolutely required reading for anyone who ever heard their grandparent complain that "food doesn't taste as good as it used to" and wrote it off to aging taste buds.  I was born in 1958 and even I notice that food doesn't taste as good as it used to. It is true that I use more spices and seasonings than my mom did--I was grown up in bland country and only tasted Indian food when I was thirty. But it's not just my changing palate--it's the food.

We're not talking evolution here, guys--we're talking simple selective breeding. If you are one of those people who doubt that it was man who took the wild strawberry (tiny, hard, intensely flavorful) and turned it into the supermarket strawberry (huge, tender, a little sour), then you're just stupid and you won't learn anything from this book. Selective breeding has been going on for millenia, and not just by humans. Any gardener knows how to create a new variety of rose--its simply a matter of labor and patience.

So...what happened to food when man stopped breeding for flavor and started breeding for good looks, fast growth, and durability when shipped long distances?  Plus a few other traits--insect resistance, tolerance for pesticides and herbicides, uniformity of size.  But taste and nutrition? Nope.

Have you ever noticed the intense cultural taboo against eating things on display in a grocery store?  Would you do it? Imagine going up to the stock boy laying out the cartons of cellophane-wrapped strawberries and asking for a sample. Imagine asking the guy behind the fish counter if you can sniff his salmon. Nope--I can't. The only exceptions are (a)Saturday at Sam's club, although the things the aproned people are cooking up and offering in little containers are typically not food*, and (b) any day at the deli counter, where you can usually get a taste of the potato salad before you buy it.

*food -- A consumable part of a plant or animal that provides essential nutrients to the eater.  Look at frozen nacho cheese bites and tell me what plant or animal they are from.

The book isn't nearly as preachy as I am and it's extremely entertaining. He's a good journalist and he didn't just sit in an office and munge this story together from magazine articles. The places he goes and the people he sees are all over the map--and then at the end he gathers them together for a good meal. I hope that wasn't a spoiler. I should have said, more accurately, he tries to gather them together for a good meal--but will the meal cooperate?

But there is one thing I have to get off my chest. After presenting evidence--piles on piles of it--of the harm man did when he tried to outwit nature, at the end he offers up man as the solution to our food problem.  Instead of trying to breed tomatoes for looking pretty after hard travel, all man has to do is to breed tomatoes that look pretty, taste good, and provide nutrition...after hard travel.  Can it be done? Yes, probably.  Will it?  Yes, maybe, but only if there's a profit in it. But in the end, will it provide what our bodies need?

I say no. Man can only select for qualities he can measure. If he does a chemical analysis on heirloom tomatoes and turns up forty distinct compounds, then he can breed for a tomato that provides these same compounds in similar quantities. But what about the trace minerals he doesn't breed for?  And in a highly competitive world of commerce, what if food scientists only bred for the three or four known nutrients or flavor components?  That's good enough, isn't it?

Skilled tasters can measure flavor, sure--but early on in the book he shows us how our taste perceptions can be fooled. With careful manipulation, you can convince people that corn coated in spices and artificial flavors (aka Doritos) tastes awesome.  In nature, good taste usually indicates good nutrition, but in the laboratory?  I dunno.

So while I agree with his general conclusion--mankind got up into this fix and mankind can get us out of it--I'm not sure with his idea that better breeding alone can fix the problem. Instead of trying to figure out how to create a tomato that can withstand hard travel and still taste like an heirloom variety fresh picked from the vine, why not figure out how to sustainably grow the heirloom varieties close to home?

When I was growing up--okay, okay, the world was a lot smaller then--our local A&P supermarket would offer bins of turnip greens, collards and mustard greens in season and purchased from local farms.  Kroger's says they still do that.  If I see the label 'locally grown' on a bag of potatoes, I'll choose it over potatoes from Idaho.  And is it not true that fresh beans start losing their flavor from the moment they're picked from the vine?  You tell me a region in the continental United State where green beans can't be grown. And even in parts of the world that are agriculturally challenged, there are sure to be crops that thrived in ancient times.  Why does mankind have to reinvent the wheel? Why not reinvent the axle, or the drive shaft--wheels can roll but without something to help them stay of course, they won't get much of anywhere.

That's my simple solution. Eat local when you can, and demand it when you can't. Mankind may not be able to produce the perfect tomato, but he can sure as heck produce a tomato in a whole lot of environments. He just needs motivation. ($$$)