science and food
...it is excellently preserved. The only trouble with it is this: year by year it grows less good to eat. It appeals increasingly to the eye. But who eats with his eyes? Almost everything used to taste better when I was a kid." Though Wylie's attitude in this article is undeniably "curmudgeonly," I find myself thinking of it every time I am faced with grayish-pink tomatoes with all the flavour of cardboard--tomatoes that have supposedly been cultivated to be of uniform size so that they will pack better. They may have been easier to ship, but they make crummy spaghetti sauce! There are also strains of fruit that have been developed to be blight-resistant, or not so sensitive to variations in temperature, etc. Fine. But however big and beautiful the resulting peach, it must taste like a peach, or why bother? As Wylie puts it: " . . . if people don't eat onions because they taste like onions, what in ...