Does the Loss of Food Flavours Begin with the Seed?

II. Rebuilding the Market and Redefining “Good” Food

When we do events in Beijing and lay out yellow carrots, people come over and ask whether they’re GM. People have been so conditioned by supermarket food that they’ll only accept a handful of varieties – as if they have already forgotten that natural food is, by its very nature, the most diverse thing there is. The decline in food freshness, quality and variety is closely tied to the supply systems behind it.

The small market cultivated by the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market is relatively healthy – consumers are willing to buy, and farmers are motivated to grow. We joke that eco farms in Beijing are fiercely competitive – they race not just on yield, but on flavour too. Farmers are starting to realise that consumers paying more aren’t simply buying food free of pesticide and chemical fertiliser, or seeking out old varieties – they want it to taste great as well. From seeds to soil management to field management, agroecology can use a range of efficient, environmentally friendly methods to achieve better flavour. But if the weather turns against you, the taste can suffer.

We believe good agriculture should yield better crops, and that “good” is ultimately expressed in flavour. For farmers, making fruit sweeter is the easiest thing to do; giving it a complex, layered flavour is enormously difficult and demands painstaking soil management behind the scenes. A measured addition of potash fertiliser can raise sugar content, but fruit ripened with chemical fertiliser never has enough time to build up the flavour compounds that make it truly enjoyable. The result is cloyingly sweet, without that satisfying balance of sweetness and tartness.

Industrial agriculture chases so-called efficiency, yet the negative costs are simply pushed onto others. But some people are choosing more diversified approaches to food production, just as consumer demand itself is diverse. The reason our food cannot be replaced by a nutrient tablet is that there is a complex, living interaction between people, food, and the natural world.

Gao Ming: So, starting around 2007, we began promoting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), hoping to encourage consumers to engage with these issues – for instance, not just picking the prettiest vegetables when they shop. It is a long and arduous undertaking.

Tianle: After “farm-to-table” was proposed, some people felt it was an elitist framing, and the prices were high. I visited Dan Barber myself – at the time he was working with agronomists and farmers, selecting for breeding on the basis of flavour. But does “seed-to-table”, breeding specifically for flavour, also carry an air of elitism? After all, people’s views on flavour differ enormously.

Guan Qi: Dan Barber’s book describes a case in the US: Stephen Jones at Washington State University. He is a professional plant breeder who runs his own bakery – he insists that any variety he develops must be one he himself enjoys eating. He is now involved in evolutionary breeding, which is essentially about restoring wheat variety diversity. He works with international scientists to do it ecologically, which is excellent but also a very particular “seed-to-table” case. I am genuinely curious – do our own scientists eat the varieties they breed?

This brings us back to another issue: customers have developed a uniform, set-in-stone expectation of what a tomato should look like. That expectation is shaped at the very front end of the seed industry, because before a seed variety can be marketed, it must pass a DUS test (a cultivation registration trial or analysis assessing Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability).

III. What Farmers Think

Guan Qi: In rural areas across southwest China, farmers still maintain a great diversity of crop varieties. These landraces – or local varieties – cannot pass the current system of variety registration, because they behave more like a living population: what grows is varied and uneven. Farmers’ needs are hugely diverse. What matters to them is not simply yield, but the stability of yield, the taste, and even cultural and spiritual needs.

Take the Xianghe Nuò, for instance – a glutinous rice variety bred by the Dong ethnic group in Guizhou. At weddings and other ceremonies, only this particular glutinous rice can be used. In that sense, a seed is not merely a physical object; it carries so much information that it allows us to reach across time and feel the culture of a place. The farming households we work with do not rank their seeds into categories of higher and lower – every variety handed down by the ancestors is treasured equally, because you never know when you might need it. Of course, breeding is about far more than GM technology and the like. Flavour is determined not by genes alone but by the environment and the way the land is farmed. In the Taihang Mountains of Hebei, for example, farmers tell us that millet tastes best only when the rows have been weeded three times.

Wang Youzao: The documentary Questions for Rice records farmers who persist in growing rice under vastly different geographic conditions, and an extraordinary diversity of rice varieties. This ecological cultivation system is extraordinarily fragile, and the element that best illustrates that fragility is, surprisingly, the pig. Before rice transplanting, they carry armfuls of pine needles from the pig sty on their backs to the fields and spread them evenly as fertiliser. Because so many young people have left for migrant work in the cities, the remaining families can no longer tend livestock, so they have no choice but to use chemical fertiliser, and traditional growing methods are becoming unsustainable.