The Supermarket Conspiracy - Who stole the flavor from my orange?
This piece ran in the Capital Press on March 17, 2006I found myself at a Bay Area food writer's dinner a few weeks ago delivering an impromptu speech on the paucity of flavor in the modern produce supply. Some of my colleagues opined that farmers have robbed our food supply of its flavor in the search for greater profits. Here follows an abbreviated version of my reply.
The lack of flavor in supermarket produce is not the fault of farmers, but rather of the purchasers, who determine the requisite attributes for the products that they buy. The movement away from flavor has it roots in the post-World War II industrialization of American agriculture, when American farmers were tasked with feeding much of the population of war-torn Europe.
Armed with a series of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that were developed as part of the war effort, farmers were able to increase their yields and to grow the surpluses required to feed the world. Around the same time, suburbs began to grow and spread. This new development necessitated the proliferation of supermarkets. All of these factors combined to set the stage for the consolidation of both the food supply and its distribution and sales channel.
Fast-forward to the present and you find it nearly impossible to find a good orange in the supermarket. They may look perfect, bright and free of mold, but they taste like little sacks of orange-flavored water. "I cold called (a major retail super market) recently," explains Chico, Ca. satsuma mandarin grower Jarald Davidson, "I happened to catch the buyer on the phone and he asked me why his citrus sales were declining. I asked him if he'd tasted his produce lately and he replied that he hadn't. I told him people weren't coming back to buy his citrus because it has no flavor."
In order to extend the shelf life of the product, the market has dictated that citrus growers pick their fruit early, before it is fully ripe. The fruit is then gassed with ethylene in order to ripen it. Thus, the stores are able to get what they want, ripe looking fruit that is as stable as under ripe fruit without having to incur the losses associated with the rate of spoilage of fruit that is actually ripe. "the fruit looks great," Davidson explains, but sinse it isn't actually tree ripened, it doesn't have the sugar and the acid to actually taste good.
Davidson explained this to the buyer to which the buyer replied “Wow, you are probably right.” However, armed with the truth, the buyer was still unwilling to discuss making any changes to his buying procedures. This is exactly why supermarket oranges have no flavor. It is more important to the purchasers to minimize loss, or shrinkage, due to over ripeness then it is for them to provide their customers with access to food that actually tastes good.
Food writers, even in the astute San Francisco Bay Area, are usually isolated from the reality of the distribution and sales channel because their task is to assess the final product rather than the means through which it came to be. However, once you explain something to them, they remember and they tell others. Perhaps the truth will bring flavor back to the supermarket.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 5:21 PM
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