Fruit Bowl.

Many years ago, when my grandfather was about the same age as I am now, we had a discussion (aka argument), probably several times. His contention was that food didn't taste the same as it used to, while I maintained that he was losing his sense of taste. With the benefit of maturity(?) I now think that the answer lay between the two extremes; yes, he couldn't taste as well as he could in his youth, but then again, the taste of food had also deteriorated. But, I have some information that Granddad didn't: I have been consuming cartons of fruit juice for something like forty years, their taste seems to have remained pretty much constant so I have a reference point while the natural fruit has progressively lost its flavour. The ingredients lists for the juices, which I have to believe, since it is illegal to misrepresent food products, say that they contain only fruit concentrate and water.

Some years ago, I was forced to attend a talk on nutrition; it was part of the rehabilitation after having had heart surgery (but I'm alright now, thank you). I argued the point with the speaker that, "since much fruit is now tasteless, it must contain no nutrients and, therefore, is not worth eating."

A few weeks ago, there was an article in "New Scientist" about the fact that the bitter taste was being breed out of many foods, a theme also taken up by the Radio4 "Food Programme"; broccoli, carrots, apples, oranges and grapefruit were the highlighted suspects. The residents of Scotland are habitual drinks of tea, coffee and 80 shilling ale, all of which owe their character to their bitterness, so I find it bizarre to suggest that we can't handle the slightly bitter taste of fruit and veg, particularly as the former often has a natural sweetness to act as a counter. This autumn is the first that I have been unable to find a variety of apple with both a satisfactory taste and texture, while grapefruit is becoming less tart and the white varieties are giving way to the milder pink and red.

Moving very slight off topic, in Britain, people are very much against genetically modified foods on the Frankenstein grounds: they are un-natural, environmentally damaging and inherently bad for our health; My take, as you might expect, is a little different; we have been modifying the genes in our foods for thousands of years, what is new is that we now have a method for spectacularly increasing the speed at which we change our foods. It used to take a long time and a lot of effort, based on trial and error, to give a crop more efficient growth, modify its flavour or improve its disease resistance; now we can transfer genes between distantly related species, such as from seaweed to pigs, so the rate of progress(?) is increased by orders of magnitude. We can now design a radical new variety from an old favourite in a few years. This year I am complaining that I can’t buy an apple that isn‘t insipid and mushy; whilst arguing with Granddad some sixty years ago we might have been biting into a crunchy, acidic but sweet apple from one of the ten trees in our garden.