Recently, a good friend who isn't able to drive much asked me to pick up an extra tomato plant or two while I was at a neighbor's greenhouse. I asked her what kind of tomatoes she wanted.
"I want to eat a tomato that tastes like it used to when I was a little girl."
While I immediately thought of an heirloom variety, Mr. Ray Coble, who has been growing tomatoes since long before I was born, decided that a German Johnson would fit the bill perfectly. While not the most beautiful specimen, they have that classic tomato flavor that just tastes like a hot summer day. But, my friend's comment got me a ponderin' about our food: how it used to be and how it is today.
Is it the chemicals sprayed? Or perhaps they have been irradiated? (Yes, that's a thing- zapping pallets of boxed food with radiation to preserve the shelf-life.) Is it the GMO varieties, or the fact that they've sat on a truck for a week or two?
I'm no food scientist, but I do know one thing: fresh food straight from the garden really does taste better. Sugars are usually one of the first things to break down when something is stored, and it's a fact that many nutrients are breaking down and missing by the time food from afar reaches the table. According to this Science Direct publication, spinach loses about 80% of its vitamin C after just 3 days of storage.
While taste and flavor are subjective qualities, nutritional value is indeed not. Over the years the starch content in our produce has skyrocketed, diluting the actual nutrients such as riboflavin, selenium, zinc, ascorbic acid as well as protein. Fingers are pointing towards the creation of crazy over productive varieties that pump out exponentially more yield than mother nature intended. I mean, what farmer doesn't want to plant and tend one seed but get twice the product? Don't even get me started on mass spraying with glyphosate on varieties of crops that have been genetically designed (marketed to farmers as "RoundUp Ready") to survive being sprayed with a cancer inducing poison so the weeds are killed, but the crop survives so we can eat it. But, alas, the fast and easy way may not be the best way. Now we have created these monsters, and we are finding that, even with a surplus of food, people are nutrient deficient and unwell.
"...today we find ourselves with a global food system that in some cases has been designed to deliver calories and cosmetic perfection but not necessarily nutrition. This is contributing to a phenomenon called hidden hunger, where people feel sated but may not be healthy, as their food is calorie-rich but nutrient-poor."
As for me and my garden, I try to stick to non-GMO, organically sourced heirloom varieties, and while I don't truly know what a tomato may have tasted like 50 years ago, I know that the food coming out of my garden is darn good, and I can't wait until 'mater season!
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