Thoughts on eating all organic

savithny

stealthq wrote: »

ccsernica wrote: »

Alatariel75 wrote: »

tomteboda wrote: »

Orphia wrote: »

It makes me chuckle when I see people say organic tastes better.

I've seen at least three videos where lots of people have been tested tasting two different fruits, one organic one regular, and the probability they get it right is no better than chance.

In general you're right, but there actually is one food that has been demonstrated (scientifically) to have lost most of its flavor in modern agricultural practices due to the needs of mass production and stability for long-range transport: the tomato.

Yes, the delicious, beautiful tomato of 2017 does not taste anything like the delicious, beautiful tomato of 1957, or even 1987. At the moment the only real recourse is to grow your own or purchase organic heirloom tomatoes from a very honest farmer.

However, grocery store tomatoes should soon taste a lot better.
Better-Tasting Grocery Store Tomatoes Could Soon Be on Their Way (2015 American Chemical Society symposium talk)

Flavor Facelift for Supermarket Tomatoes (2017 news brief, American Chemical Society)

A Chemical Genetic Roadmap to Improved Tomato Flavor (2017 Science )

I was thinking about this, I read an article/watched a doco about how the reason people in their 50s and 60s today complain that a particular favourite meal doesn't taste the way it did when their mum made it, is because the ingredients have been bred to taste very different. The example they used was chicken and noodles, and they talked about how breeding chickens for size has completely changed the way they taste. I wish I could remember more, but it's just a random brain-snippet bobbing around.

On the face of it, I have to say this doesn't sound terribly plausible. People's tastes change as they age. I eat and enjoy many foods now that I would have hated as a child. And then there are the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia affecting our recall.

For example, back around 1990 or so I knew a San Francisco native in his mid-50s who insisted that sourdough bread had gotten notably less sour since he was young. This was demonstrably false. There's only so sour you can make sourdough, as the taste comes from waste products of yeast and after a certain point the yeast just stops growing. There was no convincing him of that, though.

I think there's some truth, some nostalgia, depends on the specifics. My parents, for example, grew up eating older truly free-range chickens they had raised. The chickens ate mostly what they could forage and some feed supplement. Only ones that quit producing were ever eaten. Age of the bird and of course amount of exercise and the bird's diet definitely changes the taste so that makes sense in their case.

The sourdough thing definitely seems like nostalgia. And boy, do I wish I could get my hands on some of that 'substandard' sourdough. The stuff that passes for sourdough here barely tastes different than sandwich bread.

Actually, the sourdough thing is perfectly possible. Your argument that "there's only so sour you can make it" is true, BUT you don't have to make it that sour, and I would totally bleieve that there has been a recent trend to stop the dough fermenting beofre it reaches "peak sour." Because we make our own bread and so I know it can get REALLY sour.

I suspect there's a different thing going on though. Food has also gotten WAY more sweet. WAY WAY more sweet. Everything has sugar in it, and not just the sugars you need to feed your yeast. I'm now finding "Plain" yogurts that are sweetened, presumably to do exactly what "Mr. Sourdough" was talking about - take the edge off the sour flavor.

Meat has changed, even since I started cooking in the early 90s, let alone since I was a kid. Until fairly recently, most beef wasn't feedlot-stuffed, most pork was raised on small farms, and the animals had been bred for a different fat and flavor profile.

Add to that the current trend towards injecting meat with brine or water, and if you're a certain age, the meat you grew up on was simply *different.* One way you can see this is that older recipes sometimes don't work right anymore. Try to "brown" some cuts of meat and the just steam and turn grey. One of the reasons I buy meat from my local farmers is that I can make some of those older family dishes and have them turn out right, and taste better (to my taste buds, anyway; if you grew up with the changed meat raising and handling practices then the stuff in stores has become the "new normal").

ccsernica

savithny wrote: »

stealthq wrote: »

ccsernica wrote: »

Alatariel75 wrote: »

tomteboda wrote: »

Orphia wrote: »

It makes me chuckle when I see people say organic tastes better.

I've seen at least three videos where lots of people have been tested tasting two different fruits, one organic one regular, and the probability they get it right is no better than chance.

In general you're right, but there actually is one food that has been demonstrated (scientifically) to have lost most of its flavor in modern agricultural practices due to the needs of mass production and stability for long-range transport: the tomato.

Yes, the delicious, beautiful tomato of 2017 does not taste anything like the delicious, beautiful tomato of 1957, or even 1987. At the moment the only real recourse is to grow your own or purchase organic heirloom tomatoes from a very honest farmer.

However, grocery store tomatoes should soon taste a lot better.
Better-Tasting Grocery Store Tomatoes Could Soon Be on Their Way (2015 American Chemical Society symposium talk)

Flavor Facelift for Supermarket Tomatoes (2017 news brief, American Chemical Society)

A Chemical Genetic Roadmap to Improved Tomato Flavor (2017 Science )

I was thinking about this, I read an article/watched a doco about how the reason people in their 50s and 60s today complain that a particular favourite meal doesn't taste the way it did when their mum made it, is because the ingredients have been bred to taste very different. The example they used was chicken and noodles, and they talked about how breeding chickens for size has completely changed the way they taste. I wish I could remember more, but it's just a random brain-snippet bobbing around.

On the face of it, I have to say this doesn't sound terribly plausible. People's tastes change as they age. I eat and enjoy many foods now that I would have hated as a child. And then there are the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia affecting our recall.

For example, back around 1990 or so I knew a San Francisco native in his mid-50s who insisted that sourdough bread had gotten notably less sour since he was young. This was demonstrably false. There's only so sour you can make sourdough, as the taste comes from waste products of yeast and after a certain point the yeast just stops growing. There was no convincing him of that, though.

I think there's some truth, some nostalgia, depends on the specifics. My parents, for example, grew up eating older truly free-range chickens they had raised. The chickens ate mostly what they could forage and some feed supplement. Only ones that quit producing were ever eaten. Age of the bird and of course amount of exercise and the bird's diet definitely changes the taste so that makes sense in their case.

The sourdough thing definitely seems like nostalgia. And boy, do I wish I could get my hands on some of that 'substandard' sourdough. The stuff that passes for sourdough here barely tastes different than sandwich bread.

Actually, the sourdough thing is perfectly possible. Your argument that "there's only so sour you can make it" is true, BUT you don't have to make it that sour, and I would totally bleieve that there has been a recent trend to stop the dough fermenting beofre it reaches "peak sour." Because we make our own bread and so I know it can get REALLY sour.

I suspect there's a different thing going on though. Food has also gotten WAY more sweet. WAY WAY more sweet. Everything has sugar in it, and not just the sugars you need to feed your yeast. I'm now finding "Plain" yogurts that are sweetened, presumably to do exactly what "Mr. Sourdough" was talking about - take the edge off the sour flavor.

Meat has changed, even since I started cooking in the early 90s, let alone since I was a kid. Until fairly recently, most beef wasn't feedlot-stuffed, most pork was raised on small farms, and the animals had been bred for a different fat and flavor profile.

Add to that the current trend towards injecting meat with brine or water, and if you're a certain age, the meat you grew up on was simply *different.* One way you can see this is that older recipes sometimes don't work right anymore. Try to "brown" some cuts of meat and the just steam and turn grey. One of the reasons I buy meat from my local farmers is that I can make some of those older family dishes and have them turn out right, and taste better (to my taste buds, anyway; if you grew up with the changed meat raising and handling practices then the stuff in stores has become the "new normal").

I'm talking about relatively small local based bakeries here for the most part, not large national brands. No San Franciscan would expect good sourdough from the latter. While I suppose there must be some accommodation for local tastes, in the SF Bay Area people expect their sourdough to be sour. Such bread doesn't list sugar as an ingredient.

You're right, though, that foods are sweeter in general. I think the real problem with HFCS isn't that it's especially poisonous -- it has roughly the same proportion of fructose and glucose as cane sugar -- but that it's so, so many packaged foods. Even foods that people don't expect are sweetened. This does include many commercially produced breads.

You might have a point about the chicken varieties, although I have to say it doesn't taste strikingly different to me. But then, I (and I expect, most people on this board) haven't experienced "supermarket" chicken from before the time @Alatariel75 's article describes. And I certainly haven't had your experience with browning meat.

So on balance, it's probably a combination of things.