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.
Yes
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/655345630/how-fruit-became-so-sugary
I remember seeing this article or something similar over the years though I didn’t really look too far into it
Pardon me for checking your post history, but I noticed you’ve posted in the Canada community and therefore you might be Canadian. Is it possible you’ve been eating more local fruit this year due to boycotts? I wonder if there’s some relation.
I noticed my Ontario blueberries were very sweet this year, compared to the imported ones I’ve had in the past that could be somewhat bitter or tart. I have no evidence if this is a reason why they’re sweeter though, I’m just guessing.
I’m not sure. I’ve noticed this since before the tariffs thing, but could definitely be a factor as well.
I cant prove it but i have also noticed that fruits only taste sweet. They used to have other flavors in there but now its just like a spoon of sugar.
Fruits still have other flavors to my taste. Your sensitivity to sugar will change based on how much of it your eat, so if you’ve adapted to eating a lot less sugar you may have become so sensitive to sweetness that it overpowers other flavors.
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.
Increased carbon dioxide in the air makes fruit and vegetable have more sugar and less minerals. Don’t know if this is the explanation.
that also depends on plant genetics? There has to be a minimum ratio minerals to sugar in plants, so they can live I guess.
And poison ivy more powerful
I did notice something similar. Presumably, selective breeding at work. I read that brussel sprouts used to taste different not too long ago - the flavor and texture changed due to selective breeding. It wouldn’t surprise me if something similar is happening with fruits.
That being said, whatever is going on, it’s definitely not happening with strawberries. Still sour as fuck.
Good. Let the hate for strawberries flow through you.
(More for me.)
In addition to selective breeding like others have mentioned, supply chain logistics have gotten much more advanced over the years. You can get many fruits right at the peak of ripeness year round due to sourcing and better storage methodologies.
Science has also gotten better at giving plants what they need to grow successfully, so almost all agricultural products are much larger than they would have been 50 years ago. If you take an apple tree from an orchard, and stick it in a random person’s back yard and neglect it, it will have way smaller fruit. Irrigation, fertilization, etc, allow things to grow bigger, but the parts needed for the actual reproduction don’t really grow much, so that extra energy just ends up producing fruit that’s more “watered down”.
In a grain, for example, theres 3 parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. The germ is the little start of the seedlings, and it contains protein, minerals, and fats. The bran is the other coating that has fiber, protein, and minerals. The endosperm is mostly just carbs. In modern grain, the endosperm takes up a much larger percentage of the grain than in older varieties (and non-fertilized/irrigated/weeded/pest controlled fields)
I know when i cut out excess refined sugar and barely ate any candy, fruit suddenly tasted better and sweeter. Now things like cola or candy are too sweet for me to enjoy. I’ll maybe have a handful of candy when previously i could eat a whole meals worth.
