Why have vegetables and fruits lost their flavor over the years?

The way we produce and consume food has changed a lot in the last half century and this has had a significant impact on the taste of fruit and vegetables. One of the serious problems that is often overlooked is that food, especially fruit and vegetables, doesn't taste as good as it used to.

According to Clifford Weil, director of the Plant Genome Research Program at the National Science Foundation, the most important reason for this decline in flavor is "domestication". So why do we domesticate our food at the sacrifice of flavor? Let's take the example of tomatoes, one of the vegetables (technically a fruit) whose flavor and aroma have declined the most over the years.

Consumed almost everywhere in the world, the aroma of tomatoes is determined by sugars and acids that activate our taste buds and a range of volatile compounds that trigger our olfactory receptors. For this reason, it is often used as a sauce. Tomatoes are a vegetable that rots easily when transported long distances and kept in storage. To prevent this, tomatoes were domesticated to be resistant to these conditions.

But no genetic intervention was made. According to Zhangjun Fei, a plant geneticist at Cornell University, tomatoes and other foods have lost their flavor genes due to the preference for plants that yield more products and have more durable characteristics.The gene that helps give tomatoes their flavor is absent in 93% of domesticated (modern) species.

International researchers collected the genome information of the garden tomato and wild tomato and compared it with the genome of the domesticated tomato. This comparison revealed that the modern tomato genome lacks around 5,000 genes that garden and wild tomatoes have. As depressing as this revelation is, it could bring back the taste of tomatoes, and indeed other foods, in the years to come.

The identification of these previously unknown genes could help farmers produce better vegetables and fruits. Since these missing genes also provide plants with pathogens, tomato varieties could be developed with genetic resistance to diseases that are currently overcome with pesticides or other costly and environmentally unfriendly methods.

Those who remember the true taste of vegetables and fruits continue to consume them in little-known ways.