‘Flavour is under siege in this country’: how food in America lost its taste

Bill Tracy is clearly not one to brag, but after a while, it seems he just can’t help himself. “I did come up with something absolutely amazing actually,” he says softly. “Really quite amazing.”

Tracy has spent the last 40 years in the fields of Wisconsin as one of the US’s leading sweetcorn breeders, tasting up to 300 ears a day in search of the perfect corn that might one day sizzle on barbecues across the country.

Ten years ago, he came close with a variety that visibly captured his heart. “The first time I bit into it I said: ‘Wow,’” Tracy recalls. “Then I handed it to the person next to me and she said: ‘Wow.’ And I counted – the first 100 people who ate it, the first thing they all said was: ‘Wow.’”

Tracy is understandably proud of his creation, but those lucky enough to taste it could fit inside a mid-sized restaurant. That corn has never made it into a single grocery store or farmers’ market. While packed with flavour, farmers tell him they cannot justify growing a crop with such fragility and low yield on the type of industrial farm that dominates modern America today.

It is a typical dilemma for breeders like Tracy, who in many cases have dedicated their entire working lives to creating delicious food only to rub up against a system in which flavour is often devalued to the point of exclusion.

“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.”

Delicious food is out there – you only need to visit certain restaurants, farmers’ markets or the back of a breeder’s field to see that. But as Tracy explains, many of us living in countries with hyperindustrialised food systems can spend much of our lives without tasting any of it. For Arielle Johnson, a flavour scientist and the author of Flavorama, the difference is unequivocal. “It’s pretty obvious there’s a lot less flavour in the plants we eat today compared to the past.”

That can be a difficult assertion to prove: flavour is complex, subjective and beyond the anecdotal, and there are sparse facts to quantify its decline. But anyone can experience it – just plant a certain generations-old heirloom seed in rich soil and compare it with a modern supermarket variety most likely developed in the last 50 years.

But the story might still only be half-written. Because while the last century played host to flavour’s decline, a brigade of chefs, plant breeders and farmers are now fighting to ensure the next century sees its return. Their battle is not just the science, but persuading the power brokers in charge that flavour could be a missing ingredient to fix some of modern society’s greatest problems.

Even for a chef at the top of his game, Dan Barber has taken extraordinary depths in the pursuit of flavour. First as the owner of the coveted Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant in New York and now as the founder of Row 7, a company selling seeds and vegetables grown specially for flavour, Barber has spent decades investigating the roots of great taste, arguing influentially of its connection to healthy soils and its decimation at the hands of industrial farming.

“Flavour is under siege in this country,” he says over his car’s Bluetooth, detailing how American food culture became one of “great abundance but no attention to the kind of detail that elicits flavour”.

In his book The Third Plate, Barber placed much of the blame on a post-second world war agricultural revolution that gave rise to a new way of farming built on novel strains of crops grown in vast monocrop fields and reliant on vast quantities of chemical fertilisers.

As a policy intended to feed more hungry mouths, the results were extraordinary. Global wheat yields tripled between 1960 and 2000 while corn harvests more than doubled despite using less land, according to the UN’s food body. Norman Borlaug, the man widely recognised as the father of this “Green Revolution”, is credited with saving more than 1 billion people from starvation.

But flavour was the collateral damage. The natural complexity of soil – the substance Barber says is “the single best predictor of how food will taste” – was devastated by chemical fertilisers, which in less than a century have contributed to the degradation of more than a third of the world’s soil, the UN estimates.

This affects taste because only a strong plant grown in healthy soil can produce great flavour, Barber explains. “A weak plant doesn’t produce the polyphenols and the phytonutrients that make things taste good,” he says. “It’s hard to think of a discovery that’s been more disastrous for the flavour of food.”

But fertiliser was not the only protagonist of the agricultural revolution. Crops themselves underwent a major transformation as breeders raced to develop high-yielding varieties capable of withstanding big machinery and transportation over continents, and still stack up in stores looking fresh and polished. Flavour unwittingly fell from the conversation.

It was a trade-off, says Harry Klee, a leading flavour researcher at Florida University who has been breeding tomatoes for more than 20 years. “It was so hard to screen for flavour they basically just focused on other traits.”

While some traits such as disease resistance are controlled by just one gene, making them relatively easy to control, flavour can be driven by more than a dozen – meaning it was too complex for most breeders in a time before advanced genetic analysis, Klee says.

“The last thing they’d do was eat it, and if it didn’t taste bad they’d have a winner,” he recalls. “That’s how flavour deteriorated over the last 70 years. It was a neglect of those genetic traits.”

Tomatoes are emblematic of the decline. Back in the 1930s, a variety known as the Rutgers tomato reigned supreme across the US, accounting for over 60% of all commercially grown tomatoes thanks to its reputation for “high flavour that explodes in your mouth”, according to Tom Orton, a professor at Rutgers University.

But as mechanical harvesting dawned in the 1960s, the Rutgers tomato was swept away by tomatoes that ripened simultaneously and uniformly inside thick skins. They could withstand the rough and tumble of modern farming.

These tough new tomatoes were also perfect for the transcontinental supply chains that proliferated to provide expectant shoppers with summer fruits at all times of the year. Flavour once again became the unfortunate victim. A tasty tomato is a juicy tomato, but if you throw that in a truck and ship it 3,000 miles it’s likely to suffer some damage.

These days, food companies pick tomatoes while they are still hard and green to ensure maximum freshness, transporting them in ethylene-filled bags to ripen along the way, says Julie Dawson, a plant breeder at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The results are hardly surprising. “It’s hard to maintain flavour when crops are harvested before peak ripeness and then shipped and stored for a couple of weeks before people actually eat them,” she says.

Strawberries underwent a similar decline as the drive for bigger, juicier and hardier fruits became the dominant desire on supermarket shelves. The wild strawberries of old were typically small, sweet and delicious, but as fruits grew larger, breeders say the flavour inevitably fell away. A fruit needs sugar to taste good but a plant’s supply is limited by photosynthesis. Therefore, the bigger the fruit, the lower the sugar. The lower the sugar, the lower the taste.

The food historian Pen Vogler once noted the common Elsanta strawberry now epitomises the decline, a variety that is “fat, shiny and accommodating about cold storage as it didn’t have much taste in the first place for the cold to destroy”, she wrote in her book Stuffed.

Flavour’s demise is not just an affliction of the fruit-and-veg aisle though. When Halee and John Wepking took over their farm in rural Wisconsin, they soon realised they could achieve a much-needed income boost by stone-milling their wheat for maximum flavour. Unfortunately, they faced a culinary tradition that has broadly only known the pure-white and tasteless stuff for almost 150 years.

“The real key to flour’s flavour is the stone-milling process because you’re maintaining the maximum amount of the seeds’ integrity all the way to the plate,” John says.

While stone-milling crushes grains between two large stones, since the early 1900s the vast majority of flour has been ground in roller mills, an industrial process that separates out the wheat’s germ and bran to produce a brilliant-white flour that stores for months on end.

This is what people now demand. The only problem is that it’s the wheat’s germ and bran which hold nearly all the oils necessary for flavour and nutrition, John says. Today, though, few people even realise what they’re missing. “Even most bakers don’t look to flour for flavour. It’s just a vehicle for structure,” he says. “We’re coming at it with the approach [that] there’s beautiful inherent flavours in the grain itself, if you let them through.”

It’s a curious point: how is it that even professional chefs aren’t always aware of flavour’s absence. How have so few of us noticed – let alone care – that flavour somehow vanished from our food?

A turn to ecology might help. The marine biologist Daniel Pauly first coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” in the 1990s to explain why a longtime fisher might lament the loss of once abundant seas while a newcomer sees a few skimpy shrimps as a successful catch.

The reason, Pauly said, was that each successive generation accepts their degraded environment as normal, leaving slow but devastating losses to go completely noticed.

Some suggest flavour has succumbed to such blindness. If you’re used to eating industrially produced food held in the cold for several weeks while it makes its way to a local supermarket, then you are unlikely to expect your tomatoes to burst with rich umami or a butternut squash to be sweet and custardy.

Harry Klee recalls a taste test many years ago in which one student picked out a supermarket variety as her favourite despite being offered some of the tastiest tomatoes the team could get their hands on. Asked why, she replied: “It tastes like the one my mom buys.” Klee was dismayed. “We have to convince people there is good stuff out there,” he says.

Today, Klee is one of a small band of flavour savants using novel breeding techniques to try to restore flavour to our everyday food. In this new era, he is a leading light and his successes are well-documented – most notably in 2017 when his team confirmed the lack of taste in modern tomatoes by identifying the 26 genes responsible for the fruit’s flavour.

The findings were notable as for the first time it gave hope that flavour could be reunited with the genetics for great size and sturdiness into a single tomato suitable for supermarket shelves. However, now almost 10 years later, not much has changed.

Klee’s problem is not the science, he says, but that farmers live a precarious existence in which they are rewarded for yield, not flavour. Few are therefore willing to take a risk in pursuit of great taste. “Because they are so conservative, it’s been a really slow sell,” he says.

Klee’s work is nonetheless inspiring the next generation of breeders. Michael Mazourek at Cornell University made a name for himself in the world of flavour breeding with a no-heat habanero pepper developed during his PhD before going on to launch a honeynut squash, a mini butternut with concentrated flavour now sold in grocery stores across the US.

While Klee believes in working within the constraints of the system, Mazourek actively wants to disrupt it. He often refers to Malcom Gladwell’s story of the French impressionists who chose to ignore the elite gatekeepers and instead found their own ways to define success.

This means ignoring the demands of the mainstream food market to produce vegetables distinctive in both flavour and appearance. “You can pick two of flavour, yield and aesthetic conformity,” he says. “So if you embrace it looking different then you can focus on the yield and the flavour.”

For Mazourek, it’s about finding ways for farmers to compete with the “commodity, price-driven industry” by giving shoppers a quality advantage – whether that’s better taste or a more convenient size. “If I can make something that is tastier, more nutritious or visually distinctive, then that grower has something the consumer thinks, ‘Oh, we like this,’ and goes looking for it again.”

What if one of the reasons we eat so poorly is simple: food stopped tasting good?

The decline of flavour over the last century has coincided with some of the richest world’s biggest crises: rising obesity, poor health and the degradation of the natural world. Some researchers, farmers and breeders believe bringing flavour back could help unwind them. Governments spend billions trying to persuade people to eat more healthily, yet most still reach for McDonald’s and Doritos because, bluntly, they taste good, says Lane Selman, a professor at Oregon State University and founder of the Culinary Breeding Network.

Selman believes the simplest way to persuade people to maintain a healthy diet is to make healthy diets more delicious. “We have to make sure food tastes good so people choose to eat whole foods, fruits, vegetables, legumes, pulses, grains rather than rely on this corporate food system,” she says.

Restoring flavour could also boost the health of the planet. As it stands, farming is widely responsible for environmental harms such as poisoned waterways and degraded soils, but if those like Dan Barber are right in arguing that only great farming can produce great food, then flavour is an effective proxy for a broken system. Restore flavour, restore the health of the system.

Barber believes it is not just enough for shoppers to start buying better tomatoes. Instead, much like the government-sponsored revolution of the 20th century, farming now needs a major intervention if a broken system is to be overhauled.

In the US, he says, corn and soya beans received more than $5bn of state funding in 2024 – more than half of all farm subsidies – even though these crops primarily feed animals. It is in effect a policy that subsidises cheap meat, he argues, while research into healthier, tastier vegetables is left to scrap for ever-diminishing funds.

“If we took all that money and land and transformed it from feeding cows to funding a diverse diet that actually tasted good, you’d have something very extraordinary,” Barber says.

It is a lofty vision, albeit arguably no more ambitious than the previous one which saved billions of people from hunger. This one, though, should it come to pass, would not be fuelled by chemicals and machinery, but by hedonism, delight and pleasure.

“Can flavour change the world?” Barber ponders. “I actually think it can. I think we can do something pretty extraordinary through deliciousness.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph