Bill Tracy, a leading sweetcorn breeder in Wisconsin, has spent 40 years tasting up to 300 ears a day in search of perfect corn. A decade ago, he developed a variety so delicious that the first 100 people who tried it all said ‘Wow’. Yet this corn has never reached a grocery store or farmers’ market because farmers deem it too fragile and low-yielding for industrial-scale agriculture.
‘Everybody working on vegetables will say: “I’ve got the tastiest things in the world in the back of the field,”’ Tracy says. ‘But they just eat them with their families because they’re not marketable in our current world.’ His dilemma illustrates a broader trend: flavour has been systematically devalued in hyper-industrialised food systems.
Arielle Johnson, a flavour scientist and author of Flavorama, states: ‘It’s pretty obvious there’s a lot less flavour in the plants we eat today compared to the past.’ While hard to quantify, the difference becomes clear when comparing heirloom seeds grown in rich soil to modern supermarket varieties developed in the last 50 years.
Chef Dan Barber, founder of Row 7 seed company, argues that post-second world war agricultural policies prioritised yield over taste. Global wheat yields tripled and corn harvests more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, but flavour was collateral damage. ‘Flavour is under siege in this country,’ Barber says, citing chemical fertilisers that devastated soil complexity – ‘the single best predictor of how food will taste’.
Yet a brigade of chefs, breeders and farmers is now fighting to restore flavour. Their battle involves not only science but persuading industry power brokers that flavour could help solve modern society’s greatest problems.
