>> Consumers these days expect year-round availability of a product, which is consistent every time a person buys it, eats it, and cooks with it.
It's like a fairy tale witch cursed us all for our greed: you will have any food you like any time you like it, but it will taste bland and boring and you will long for a taste you have never known.
That's why people get so protective of their food culture, even their food habits (like meat-eaters getting up in arms when they hear from vegans). It's because if we leave food completely at the hands of big food, we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving and just good enough to eat to keep us from all going mad.
> we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving
That's not a problem with "big food" - the food is far too nutritious and abundant. Sugary cereals for children and big macs can't be described at "just keeping us from starving".
We want restricted (but complete) nutrition that is just enough to keep us from starving, so that we maintain our size and don't end up with an energy abundance that causes processes like fat storage and inflammation to run wild.
Even outside "big food", the virtue of trying to maximize "tasty" means that our home cooking is also driven by food addiction - "big food"'s laser focus on this makes them much more effective in making addictive foods at the lowest cost, in turn making the healthier options seem "bland".
Our bodies and food reward systems are not geared for this abundance of concentrated nutrition.
It's only "good" if the tastier versions of food don't come with even more nutrition that we cannot handle. Carrots in their natural form are for example not at all as large, sweet and nutritious as the orange things we have now. They were bitter and bland.
There are different meanings or measures of what nutritious and taste mean, which I feel like is contributing to miscommunications here.
Nutrition as you define it seems to be purely calories. Another definition would be complete micronutrient profile.
Taste as you define it seems to be fat, sugar, salt. Another definition would be complexity of taste.
Big food currently optimizes for the first definitions of above which is bad for long term health. Second definitions of above would be better for long term health.
Nutrition is to me all the nutrients we need to consume. The same rules apply to them all - we need a certain amount of them all, all non-engineered foods only cover some subset of it (hence needing to eat “balanced” to even things out), and we handle abundance of any of them very poorly. “Big food” is not problematic because of what it lacks (getting more of any time of nutrition is easy in modern society), but because of what it has too much of (hard to uneat something). Hence too nutritious. I won’t argue against there being other definitions, but I find this one most appropriate and indicative of the problem. :)
No, your assumption of my definition of “tasty” is not right. Did you like the taste? Then it is tasty. Eating tasty foods is pleasurable, and therefore addictive. And what home cook wouldn’t try to make their food more tasty?
Fats, sugars and salts are shortcuts to maximizing primitive tastiness because “tasty” is meant to drive a search for nutrients and a guidance away from dangerous foods (especially salt giving how rare it can be - ever seen what animals do to get to a salt lick?), but that’s all.
Complexity is itself not tastiness. If a “complex” taste does not make you want to eat more, I’d argue that the food was not at all tasty, but just an interesting experience. Like seeing an art piece that was not beautiful and certainly not something you’d ever consider buying, but still worth having a look at once on a special day.
You are basically ignoring an entire dimension of food taste, enjoyment, and satisfaction by saying complexity is not tastiness. Plus you are ignoring the fact that nutrition includes micronutrient profile. Then you are concluding that high calorie food has high nutrition and tasty foods are foods that you want to eat more of. No offense but this is like a child's view of food, or maybe some kind of food addict view of food. There is a lot more to nutrition and taste than your current definition of it.
You are ignoring that I am in fact including both macro and micro nutrient profile (if you exceed any individual parameter, you have consumed too much nutrition) and that I am using the widest possible definition of food taste that would include any type of pleasurable food experience - merely implying that complexity alone itself is not tastiness. Complex taste profiles can be tasty, but sometimes they are merely interesting.
The focus on too much is important. No food has everything you need (other than engineered Soylent-like foods), and we rely on composing a healthy diet by using foods whose profiles augment each other. The weaker the nutrition of a food item, the more room you have to augment your diet to obtain the needed balance. If you are already close to any limit, your options for augmentation to cover the remaining needs without reaching an excess is heavily reduced. If a single food item already exceeds any limit, there is no way to construct a healthy diet with it.
If your way of dealing with disagreement is to call opposing views childish, then it is safe to say that you are not mature enough to hold a discussion on the matter.
Looks like you completely made up the interpretation that you wanted and fitted your point.
Your point can be valid, but it does lose strength when your interpretation of the previous comment gets both points backwards.
"I don't fit in a generalisation therefore that generalisation is not true". At the same time, not sure we have the data to back up the original argument. Personal anecdata? People around do expect to find everything all year round, and they get mad if they don't.
What are you supposed to say if you read a statement that includes you in a group you don't belong? That's why it's important to be more precise instead of saying "customers" in general.
It’s obviously a generalization. If you don’t fit that description then they’re obviously not talking about you therefore nothing has to be done. Why would you have to say anything anyways? Who are you?
"personal anecdata" or not, what he is saying is market demand. If you offer cavendish that taste like mashed potatoes, you won't see that persons money. Mine neither. Fact.
There are plenty of examples of produce bred for color, size, and shelf-life over flavor (e.g. tomatoes). In general, the fruits and vegetables we have today are fantastically more delicious and edible than long ago. Watermelon might be the best example of this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-pa...
The article doesn't go far enough back in time to flesh out quite how absurd the Cavendish story is as a tale of exploitation. After centuries of generational wealth transfer in the Cavendish family, it was developed by gardeners working for a Duke who was sent some as a gift from the recently invaded colony of Mauritius (the British overthrowing previous French colonists).
They were grown in the middle of England in the largest greenhouse in the world (heated by 8 coal fired furnaces requiring so much fuel that a small railway was installed). It sat a few minutes walk from a house (one of 8 the Duke inherited), literally covered in gold so it would look nice during sunsets.
The bananas won a horticultural prize in London and were then shipped off around the world - setting the scene for where the article picks up.
South India has a pretty diverse collection of banana species, even from my limited experience. You have red bananas; plantains; and these very small (some are about the length of a finger) and delicate yellow bananas known locally as Yelakki, among others.
then there is the hill banana, also small like the one above. grows in the Palani Hills in Western Tamil Nadu, at least. maybe in other hilly places too. it may be the same as the above one. not sure.
one of the best banana varieties for flavour, not just sweetness, is the nendran or nendrapazham, grown in Kerala, and maybe in western Tamilnadu.
it's slightly larger than, and looks different from, the common banana. the outer surface is somewhat ridged, like a ridge gourd.
it can be eaten either raw or cooked. very different taste from the common banana.
I recently bought a batch of six bananas from a local farmer's market - they were very fresh and very green and smaller, having just been picked. I let them ripen at home over the next 3 days.
They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not.
After reading the article, I'm going to check with the grower whether or not these were Cavendish bananas which are the norm around this banana-growing area, or something else.
Might be dwarf Cavendish which is what they grow on the Canary Islands in Spain. It's abut 1/2 the size of the full Cavendish and to me taste slightly better.
it is not a one-off. this is commonly done in India. in fact people even put a branch of bananas into a steel storage drum full of raw rice to help them to ripen. I don't know the science behind it.
Ripening fruit/veges give off ethylene oxide which causes further ripening.
If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.
Here in the tropics fruit ripens very quickly (chemical reactions proceed faster with increased temperature). I try to slow that down by keeping the stuff cold in the fridge. (But the fridge traps the EtO anyway!)
interesting. I think I remember reading that fruit producing companies use ethylene gas to artificially ripen some types of fruit. but I did not know that it can also happen naturally.
good to know. I guess that explains why the traditional Indian method works.
>If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.
but why would you want to do that? trap that, I mean? i would have thought you would want to use a fan to blow away the naturally occurring ethylene gas, so that it does not cause the fruit to ripen fast / further.
my god, the number of insane downvoters on hn. they even downvote you for an innocuous comment like mine above. I can only guess that they are losers or haters or retards or are hurting heavily for some reason, so they feel the need to strike out blindly, to get some kind of pathetic relief from whatever it is that they are hurting from. it could be job loss, or lack of money, no SO, etc. See Maslow.
I think you're way out of line. It's you who appears deranged over some downvotes.
Why are you reaching so far into the "why" and assigning those users very strange and hurtful characteristics? "Insane", "retards", "haters", "no money and no love in their life". Are you sure the reasons can't be simpler? What do the HN guidelines say on the topic?
PS: I don't have the ability to downvote anything in case you think I'm your mortal enemy / hater / retard.
it's just that it seems to me that is senseless of these people to downvote comments for what seems like no good reason at all. and like I said somewhere else here recently, why can't they make a reply comment, saying what they think is wrong with my comment, if they disagree - as you just did. I can't tell, by a downvote, whether they just disapprove, or actually disagree. and if they disagree, it would be helpful if they said why. downvoting seems like the lazy option in the case of disagreement.
but yes, you really cannot change people. either they have some good reason for doing it, which I don't understand, or they just are that way.
anyway I am getting tired of doing it, so maybe I'll take your advice and just ignore it from now on.
PSA: unripe bananas are medicinal, if you struggle with a "sensitive GI tract" I highly recommend trying to eat an at least slightly green banana every morning.
> Unripe bananas contain mostly starch, which makes up 70–80% of their dry weight. Much of that starch is resistant starch, which is not digested in the small intestine. For that reason, it's often classified as dietary fiber. However, bananas lose their starch as they ripen.
I have been very curious to try a Gros Michel after learning that the common artifical banana flavor is supposed to taste like them, not like the post-Panama Disease bananas.
I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.
The Freakonomics podcast [1] did a whole episode on this topic. It's one of the more fascinating episodes in my opinion, and I can't eat a banana now without thinking about the Gros Michel.
The title is click baity, here is the paragraph answering the question:
> This is precisely what happened in the early to mid-20th century. Panama disease, a wilt-causing fungus, evolved to attack one Gros Michel banana tree. It was then able to infect all the Gros Michel banana trees which were planted in close quarters with one another on these massive banana plantations. Only by switching the crop to a new banana that American consumers would like [-Cavendish] —one that was similar to the Gros Michel in color and shape, but was genetically distinct from it—could the banana industry save itself from collapsing. In the process, though, we lost the better banana.
If you ever try bananas from Philippines, the Latundan is great. In general, once you taste how good all the different bananas can be, you'll never want to just go back to the Cavendish which is mostly boring.
I assume that bananas that ripen naturally also taste better than those picked green, shipped halfway across the world and then ripened in ripening chambers? I tried various bananas in South America, but not a naturally ripened Cavendish, so I can't say for sure, but I know that this is the case for tomatoes.
Yeah, tomatoes only taste of tomato in the heart of summer, and even then you better be in a place that produces them rather than one that imports them.
I'm guessing that's because tomatoes are fruit and fruit always tastes better when it's in season. For instance, I wonder if I've ever known the true taste of ripe mango. I have eaten plenty of mangoes, but I only ever eat them in the UK, where they're imported. I suspect that they taste very differently (as in much better) if you pick them from a tree in the right season. I bet South-East Asians in the UK must turn their noses up to the local mango supply, like I do with, well, most veg really.
It's like a fairy tale witch cursed us all for our greed: you will have any food you like any time you like it, but it will taste bland and boring and you will long for a taste you have never known.
That's why people get so protective of their food culture, even their food habits (like meat-eaters getting up in arms when they hear from vegans). It's because if we leave food completely at the hands of big food, we'll all end up eating food that it is just nutritious enough to keep us from starving and just good enough to eat to keep us from all going mad.