I don’t know if it’s because of me growing up and my tastes changing, but I could swear fruits from the grocery store when I was a kid were nowhere near as sweet as they are now. Some of the fruits I’ve eaten recently are genuinely sweeter than soda because the soda tastes bitter after eating the fruit.
Are they selectively breeding/GMOing fruits to produce more sugar? Is that bad? I feel like that’s a bad thing but don’t actually know.
Good point, I remember being told as a kid not to have sweets before fruit, lest the fruit taste sour or bitter in comparison. Order hasn’t mattered to me in recent memory. Wouldn’t be surprised if sweeter fruits helped the bottom line, even if at the cost of more nuanced flavors.
Biggest changes that come to mind are strawberries and apples in the past several years. Either I’ve gotten good at picking the sweet ones or the sour ones have been eliminated by the increasingly sugary gene pool. I’m leaning towards it being a matter of selective breeding rather than GMO since they haven’t even deployed the low-hanging fruit of genetic security patches, namely Panama virus resistance for Walmart’s bestselling product.
With how sugary the Western diet has become, it probably isn’t too good. I’m not a plant biologist, but it would be a tragedy if fruits are now expending more resources building up sugar stores rather than vitamins and non-sugar flavor compounds. Recall the tragedy of the Red Delicious apple, in which the quest for a perfectly red fruit led to a tough skin and mealy, bland flesh.
This is my thought as well. Farms are just picking the sweetest ones and breeding those because they get better “yields” in terms of selling their fruit.