Modern takes on heritage
People think that older varieties have more flavour, but it’s often simply not true, writes James Wong.
AS the leaves begin to turn, right now is the perfect time to start ordering fruit trees and bushes to plant out. However, I implore you not to fall victim to the buzzword ‘‘heritage’’ in the catalogues, at least if you are looking for good flavour. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but speaking as a botanist who has tried and tested hundreds of varieties for flavour, I can give you some good reasons why to avoid these plants.
There is the popular belief that the older the variety, the better the flavour. Harking back to a time before intensive plant breeders bred all the ‘‘goodness’’ out of crops, according to this narrative modern crops are watery, bland, loaded with sugar and low in nutrition. Diet gurus on Twitter warn that modern fruit is now so sugary that zoo monkeys can no longer be fed bananas. Celebrity chefs will claim modern apples have seen their sugar content double, pandering to our ‘‘insatiable sweet tooth’’. Food writers will even report on the ‘‘toxic truth’’ of grapes such as Thompson Seedless. One thing you will rarely see, however, is evidence.
It seems, today, even the subject of fruit growing can’t escape our temptation to retreat to an idealised past. But these claims are easily disproved.
One of the dominant ‘‘modern’’ bananas on the market today is the Dwarf Cavendish, which actually traces its roots back to the 1800s. The same is true for many of today’s most popular apples. The notsotoxic truth behind Thompson Seedless grapes is that it’s just the American name for Sultanina grapes that date back to at least the Ottoman Empire.
To add to the confusion, many ‘‘heritage’’ and ‘‘heirloom’’ cultivars are also anything but. The multicoloured mixes of tomatoes I have seen for sale under this moniker are usually a motley crew of cultivars bred from the 1980s onwards, that just have the quirky appearance to play the part. When you test these crops, this seemingly neat distinction between ‘‘tasteless’’ modern types and ‘‘flavourful’’ traditional ones is often a function of marketing.
In fact, the date of introduction is a poor predictor of the sugar, nutrient or flavour levels in crops. It’s true that some oldschool crops, such as Morello cherries, if eaten fully ripe, will knock the socks off most modern cultivars bred for easy transport. But probably the most highly ranked tomato variety for flavour, Sungold, only dates back to the 1990s. When modern plant breeders aim for better flavour (which they are often increasingly doing for the homegrower market) they can really strike gold.
But perhaps one of the most confusing things about these claims is that they are often contradictory. It is hard to be ‘‘watery and tasteless’’ as well as ‘‘full of sugar’’, because sugar is one of the key compounds responsible for fruit flavour.
Moral of the story? By all means grow ‘‘heritage’’ crops — some are wonderfully flavourful — but so are many ‘‘modern’’ ones. In fact, many of the varieties you may think are ‘‘heritage’’ are actually ‘‘modern’’ and vice versa. — Guardian News and Media