It does starts with potatoes: “nowadays potatoes don’t even have the shade of the taste of the ones of thirty, forty years ago”, F. tells me. We need not to argue, we know that such is an statement of fact. We know that most of the vegetables that we can get in a super market are tasteless, particularly in Europe. Getting to think about it brings the next, nostalgic thought, and in one go we are dreaming with the spectacular fruits and vegetables of South and East europe. We realize, once more, that here in the north what we get are water balloons: big, good looking and ultimately tasteless produce. In the end, here in the north we are screwed by the big industries, like Monsanto or whichever name they have nowadays.
But, are we now?
After all, the change in taste in potatoes, or even more evident, brussels sprouts, are not part of a conspiracy of the powers that be to make us have tasteless food. If anything, it is the contrary. It is us who prefers brussels sprouts that have softer tastes than the ones in the market few decades ago. The change of the cultivar is actually well documented. And it hasn’t only happened with bitter tasting brussels sprouts: One of my friends is a financial advisor, working for the farming (dutch) industry. A few years back he was advising some potato farmers, and showed up at a dinner with potatoes just harvested. We did a purée that I still remember, with the great earthy taste of good produce and a creamy texture that I had not eaten before -or after-. I asked about the potatoes, and they were eigenhamer, a cultivar that was being lost, he said. When I asked, he explained me that they have too many eyes for the public taste, so their price is in constant decline. It is us, the clients, who does not want them, who seems to prefer big, smooth and tasteless ones.
Yet one might argue that no human alive would prefer a dutch grown-in-greenhouse tomato to any of its cousins raised at the sunshine of the greek or bulgarian countryside. This feels more like a conspiracy, doesn’t it? My friend F. travels frequently to the east of Europe, and can rhapsodize about the tomatoes that grow there. So do I, when I think in the ones that I have eaten in Sofia or in Madrid, almost impossible to associate to the red things that we buy here under the same name. But are the companies the ones screwing us up?
I think that we are the problem.
We all want to eat tomatoes. It is actually not a bad thing to eat tomatoes, in the middle of this cold, unfriendly and ultimately grey dutch winter. The thing is that there are not enough tomatoes in Greece, or in Bulgaria, to feed all of us dutchies (and germans and norwegians and the whole lot). And if there were, they would not make it to this far north of ours. We would have to have some sort of airplane bridge, actually closer to a teleportation device, for us northerlies to eat decent tomatoes. So? do we stop to eat tomatoes altogether? Of course not. We do our water bombs, we call them tomatoes, and we eat them. We are indeed the problem. We are too many.
Just remember how the potatoes came into our menu. They are not even from here, they are South American import. At arrival they saved Europeans from famines at the end of the eighteenth century, when the governments of the time changed agricultural regulations in order to allow what was then thought as mass production. Climate change was happening (there was a period of cold then, known as the little ice age) and potatoes were capable to thrive and feed us, or our ancestors actually. So our hunger, and our unstoppable will to survive is what created then, and today, that mass production of vegetables that we, also, despise. As Boris Johnson would say, we want to have our cake and we want to eat it too.
But it has to taste better.