Does the loss of food flavour begin with the seeds?
From hunter-gatherers to slash-and-burn agriculture, from toiling in the fields to GMOs, drones, lab-grown meat, and even AI technology; from being confined to the kitchen to waiting for food deliveries—humanity’s agricultural and food systems have undergone a radical transformation. The seismic shifts occurring in our farmlands reflect the impact of science and technology on agriculture, while profoundly influencing the natural environment, farmers, social structures, human diet, and health. Multinational agricultural capital and government regulation have played a decisive role in this process.
How did these changes happen? And how should we understand them? Whether as consumers or farmers, as part of the food and agricultural system, is it possible for us to find our own interests amidst these competing forces and discover the optimal solution for our labour and consumption?
In his book *Empire of Seeds*, American environmental historian Bart J. Elmore uses detailed records and vivid narratives to trace the history of Monsanto, a representative of multinational agrochemical corporations. He reveals its complete transition from a chemical company to an agrochemical firm and finally into a biotech giant, the various social and ecological disasters caused by its products from production to consumption, and the methods it used to desperately conceal these adverse effects and evade responsibility. By examining Monsanto, *Empire of Seeds* provides readers with a more direct understanding of the history and current state of the contemporary food system.
On Friday, 16 August at 18:30, we have invited historians, sociologists, and practitioners who have long been focused on and involved in seed systems to participate in a Beijing sharing session for *Empire of Seeds* at Wan Sheng Shu Yuan. Readers in Beijing are welcome to attend, or you may register for the online live stream. Let us together review the history of agriculture and look forward to the future of food.
Since April this year, the *Empire of Seeds* new book sharing events, co-hosted by Foodthink, Sanlian Academic, Yali, and the Farmers’ Seed Network, have been held in Nanning, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Kunming, and Guangzhou. At each stop, academic and practical guests from diverse backgrounds engaged in dialogues regarding the book and the wider food and agricultural issues it touches upon. The organisers have edited and compiled several of these discussions to share with readers in writing. You can also watch the replays on Foodthink’s video channel to see the full discussions.
Guest Speakers
Chris St. Cavish
An American writer and researcher based in Shanghai focused on food; author of *Yang Pan*.
Guan Qi
Seed system researcher and Head of the Eastern Office of the Farmers’ Seed Network.
Gao Ming
Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies, School of Liberal Arts, Shanghai University, and rural development volunteer.
Wang Youzao
Environmental activist and director of the documentary *Ask the Rice*.
Moderator
Tian Le
Founding Editor of Foodthink and convenor of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market.
I. Lost Food Flavours
Chris St. Cavish: As an American, I’ve always known that Monsanto was a terrible company. This book uses details and data to prove that the idea that GMO seeds can cope with world population growth and solve hunger is actually a mirage, while ordinary people and the environment have suffered as a result; the only winner is the Monsanto company. Why did we have to go through all this?
Tian Le: You were once a chef, working in high-end restaurants in both the US and China. Later, you focused on food-related writing and research in China. From the perspective of a food consumer, what impact do you think companies like Monsanto have had on food that the general public can actually feel?
Chris St. Cavish: Growing up in the US, people thought that those hard, tasteless tomatoes that looked the part were ‘good’ tomatoes.
Chris St. Cavish: In the US, unless you live in California or a state close to the growing regions, it is difficult to find high-quality produce, or you have to pay a significant premium for it. The reason I mention tomatoes is that I am currently writing a series of articles for Food and Wine (Food and Wine) magazine, researching pork and tomatoes. When I began this research, I asked many chefs in Shanghai which ingredients had lost their flavour most rapidly. They told me it was pork and tomatoes.
So, I started at the farm, studying seeds and soil management alongside scientists as a way to understand the food supply chain. As far as cultivation goes, I am a complete novice. Yet I was surprised by the extent of the disconnect between chefs and the growing process. Chefs dislike the taste of modern tomatoes, so they add tomato purée, sugar, or MSG to their dishes, but they don’t ask, ‘Where can I buy better tomatoes?’ Today, we are discussing seeds, agriculture, food, health, and flavour, yet not a single chef seems interested in these issues. I am still exploring what matters most for the tomato—is it the seed genetics, the ripening process, or soil management? I talk to farmers to understand their perspectives.
Let me give a positive example and a negative one. The positive example is a tomato grower I found in Pudong. She is very attentive to the variety and ripeness of her tomatoes, harvesting and selling them only when they are almost bursting, even though this often means taking a financial loss. The negative example is a head chef at a three-star Michelin restaurant in Shanghai. He told me, ‘Don’t try to play me with your “vegetable stories”; I am only interested in produce that guarantees quality and consistency.’
I know McDonald’s cannot use heirloom tomato varieties, but if the chefs at the world’s finest restaurants cannot accept an imperfect tomato, who can? This isn’t just a problem for chefs; it’s a problem for all of us. After all, who doesn’t love a tomato that looks beautiful?
In a 2023 study, researchers visited supermarkets in Shanghai to ask people what factors they considered when choosing tomatoes. Everyone mentioned external factors—appearance, price, and uniformity of size—but no one mentioned taste. This is because they fear that tomatoes which look imperfect are genetically modified. Quite the opposite; compared to genetically modified tomatoes, ‘real’ tomatoes often look imperfect. In the United States, the food movement has been driven largely by the advocacy of renowned chefs and restaurants, perhaps most interestingly in the case of Dan Barber in New York.
Chris Shen: However, over the past decade, Barber’s own views have evolved. People have realised that “farm-to-table” is too late; we should be discussing “seed-to-table”. Whether you buy ingredients from Hema, Dingdong Maicai, or a wet market, the flavour and quality have already been determined by the farmers and the seeds they use; even the best soil and farming methods cannot fix a poor seed.
Yet, seeds in the US are controlled by just four companies. In China, as far as I know, there are currently over 7,000 seed companies, along with seed exchanges and conservation efforts, which is a very positive thing.
Of course, very few people are currently advocating for flavour in this field. In the research I’ve read, scientists are studying how to add GABA (a neurotransmitter) to tomatoes to improve human mood, or how to grow tomatoes on space stations, but they have forgotten about the taste. We need yield and health, but we also need deliciousness. Perhaps eventually, we can find a way to balance them.
Gao Ming: I might disagree with Chris on the idea of basing research solely around “tastiness”. My partner practices ecological farming in Fengxian, Shanghai, and we eat the vegetables produced there. Once, I had a vegetable that tasted very bitter, and I wondered: aren’t vegetables grown through ecological farming supposed to taste great? He answered that the bitterness might be due to a lack of rain, and poor growth might be due to abnormal temperatures—that is simply nature. In fact, nature has been damaged, and we see extreme weather every year. So, if nature is wounded, why should we expect humans to always eat something delicious? Localised ecological farming cannot change the entire natural environment; the state of the crop reflects the problems of the environment. We need to consider multiple levels: nutrition, the safety of technology, and the form of agricultural production.
II. Rebuilding the Market and the Definition of “Good” Food
When we held an event in Beijing and displayed yellow carrots, some people asked if they were genetically modified. People have been so conditioned by supermarket food to accept only a few varieties that they seem to have forgotten that natural food is, by its very nature, diverse and colourful. It is fair to say that the decline in freshness, quality, and variety of food is closely linked to the underlying supply system.
The small market created by the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market is relatively healthy—consumers are willing to buy, and farmers are motivated to grow. We joke that ecological farms in Beijing are quite “competitive”—not just in terms of yield, but also in flavour. Farmers are beginning to realise that consumers are paying more not just for food that is free from pesticides and fertilisers or for heirloom varieties, but because they want it to taste good. From seeds and soil management to field management, ecological agriculture can use many non-polluting, efficient methods to achieve better taste. However, weather conditions can still impact the flavour.
We believe that good agriculture should yield better crops, and this “goodness” is manifested in the taste. For a farmer, making fruit sweeter is the easiest part; making the flavour complex is the real challenge, requiring meticulous soil management. Adding a suitable amount of potassium fertiliser can increase sugar content, but fruit forced to ripen with chemical fertilisers doesn’t have enough time to accumulate the flavour compounds that make it truly delicious. The resulting fruit is cloyingly sweet, lacking the layered balance of sweet and tart.
Industrial agriculture pursues so-called efficiency, but the negative costs are borne externally. However, some choose more diverse methods of agricultural production, just as consumer demands are becoming more diverse. The reason food cannot be replaced by simple nutrients is that there is a complex interaction between humans, food, and nature.
Gao Ming: That is why, around 2007, we began promoting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), hoping to encourage consumers to learn about these issues—for instance, not to choose vegetables based solely on looks when shopping. It is a long and difficult journey.
Tian Le: After “farm-to-table” was proposed, some felt it was a very elitist expression and that the prices were too high. I have visited Barber, and at the time, he was working with agronomists and farmers to breed for taste. But is “seed-to-table”—breeding for flavour—also elitist? After all, people have very different perceptions of flavour.
Guan Qi: In Dan Barber’s book, he mentions a US case: Stephen Jones from Washington State University. He is a professional breeder who owns his own bakery—he insists that the varieties he breeds must be ones he personally enjoys eating. He is now involved in “evolutionary breeding,” which is essentially restoring the genetic diversity of wheat, working with international scientists using ecological methods. This is a wonderful but very specific example of “seed-to-table”. I wonder, do our own scientists eat the varieties they breed?
This brings us back to another issue: customers have formed a uniform conception of what a tomato should look like. This notion is shaped at the very front end of the seed industry, because before seeds are pushed to market, they must undergo DUS testing (referring to tests for Distinctness, Uniformity, and Stability).
III. The Farmer’s Perspective
Guan Qi: In the rural areas of the Southwest, farmers preserve a wide variety of crop strains. These farm-saved or local varieties cannot pass current seed certification because they behave more like a population—their growth is non-uniform. Farmers’ needs are highly diverse; they aren’t concerned with raw yield, but rather with stability of yield, flavour, and even cultural and spiritual requirements.
For example, “Xianghe Nuo” is a rice variety bred by the Dong people of Guizhou; only this specific glutinous rice can be used in ceremonies such as weddings. In this sense, a seed is not just a material entity; it carries a wealth of information that allows us to travel through time and experience local culture. The farmers we work with don’t divide seeds into hierarchies; any variety passed down from their ancestors is preserved with equal care, because you never know when it might be needed. Of course, breeding involves more than just technologies like GMOs. Flavour is determined not only by genetics but also by the environment and farming management. In the Taihang Mountains of Hebei, for instance, farmers will tell us that millet only tastes good if it has been cultivated and weeded three times.
Wang Youzao: The documentary *Asking Rice* records farmers who persist in growing rice under various geographical conditions, as well as a vast array of rice varieties. This ecological farming system is exceptionally fragile, and the link that best represents this fragility is, surprisingly, the pig. Before transplanting the seedlings, they carry bundles of pine needles—used as bedding in pigsties—to the fields and scatter them evenly as fertiliser. Because many young people have left for urban jobs, these families can no longer tend to livestock and are forced to use chemical fertilisers, making traditional farming methods unsustainable.
This shows that the further consumers are from producers, the harder it is to support more sustainable and diversified production, even if they are paying a significant amount. In the realm of food, there is a strange piece of common sense: “Protect me by eating me.” If people don’t consume specific varieties, farmers become less daring about planting or breeding them, and they may face extinction. To maintain this diversity, we need to discover more of these varieties and support them through consumption.
Guan Qi: Although commercial hybrids, high-yield varieties, and GMOs seem to appear endlessly today, seed diversity is vanishing rapidly. In the 1940s, there were 46,000 varieties of rice; now there are only 1,000. Wheat originally had 13,000 varieties, now there are only five or six hundred. In fact, breeders are also hindered by the decrease in local varieties. Many current rice and wheat varieties have very narrow parental lines, which is somewhat like inbreeding. The flaw is this excessive uniformity; when faced with pests, diseases, or extreme weather, the risks are amplified.
There are different ways to protect germplasm resources. The most widespread current strategy is ex-situ conservation, which involves centralised storage in cold vaults. National seed banks have now collected 530,000 seed backups, which is a final-resort solution. However, centralised storage increases the risk of destruction during disasters or war, and seeds in cold storage lose the opportunity to interact and evolve with nature.
Therefore, we must also emphasise in-situ and living conservation—”walking on two legs”. In the hands of farmers, seeds preserve their diversity in a living state, interacting not only with nature but co-evolving with farmers and even consumers, serving as an excellent supplement to seed banks. I believe the current trend towards high monopoly in the seed market is anti-evolutionary, because without diversity, there can be no evolution.
– Co-organised by –
Foodthink
Tencent News
Academic Publishing Branch of Sanlian Bookstore (Life · Reading · Knowledge)
Yali
Farmers’ Seed Network
Coordinated by: Tianle
Transcription and Editing: Aneal
Edited by: ZX