Why Your Curry Tastes Different

Science & Technology  ·  Synthesis

Cook the same gravy twice this week. Once with the big, smooth, evenly red tomatoes. Once with desi tomatoes — smaller, softer, a little misshapen.

The second one will taste better. Deeper, more sour, more finished.

You already knew that. What you may not know is why — and that the tomato lost more than taste. Your tongue caught one part of the change. It missed the rest.

What you can taste

In 2017, Harry Klee’s team at the University of Florida compared 398 kinds of tomato — modern, old and wild. The modern ones were missing many of the gene versions behind the old smell, and had less sugar to begin with.

Breeders spent decades picking the biggest fruit, and they got it. What went with it was much of the plant’s ability to make sweetness and smell in the first place.

Then there’s the green patch. Old tomatoes ripened unevenly and kept a stubborn green shoulder near the stem. Growers disliked it, because they couldn’t tell when a crop was ready. So when a tomato turned up that ripened evenly all over, everyone switched to it.

That green patch wasn’t a flaw. Ann Powell’s team at the University of California, Davis showed in 2012 that it was the part of the fruit making some of its own sugar from sunlight. The change had switched it off.

Nobody set out to make tomatoes worse. Breeders chose what they could see — size, colour, how well it survived the truck. Add to that when the fruit is picked: a tomato harvested green to survive the journey, and ripened later in a warehouse, never builds the sugar and smell a vine-ripened one does. The seed and the calendar work against you together.

The same thing happened to the Brussels sprout. In the 1990s, Hans van Doorn and his colleagues at a Dutch seed company worked out which chemicals made sprouts bitter, and breeders crossed old, mild varieties with modern high-yield ones. Sprouts lost their bite and, in America at least, sales took off. But those bitter chemicals are the same ones that laboratory studies link to the health benefits of the cabbage family. When the bitterness went, so did they.

What you can’t taste

Sweetness and smell are the losses you notice. Others left quietly.

Minerals don’t taste of anything. Iron, zinc and calcium have no flavour in food, so nothing warned you. A plant bred to grow bigger fills up mostly with extra water and starch, and the minerals don’t keep pace. Donald Davis at the University of Texas reviewed the trials that plant an older variety and a modern one bred for size side by side in the same soil. The older one comes out richer in the minerals they measured — more calcium in broccoli, more iron and zinc in wheat. The big one is mostly extra water. One caution: Robin Marles, reviewing the same evidence in 2017, argued that part of the apparent decline is this dilution effect and part is changes in how food was measured over the decades — so the drop is real, but smaller and less uniform than the headline figures suggest.

Vitamins fade on the way to you. A vegetable that’s been picked is still alive, still using itself up with nothing coming in. Green beans and spinach lose about three-quarters of their vitamin C in a week in the fridge, according to a University of California, Davis review by Joy Rickman and Diane Barrett. Neither tastes any different for it. Potatoes, carrots, cabbage and onion hold on for weeks. Greens, peas, beans and herbs go fastest.

Which brings up the part most people don’t believe at first: frozen usually beats the “fresh” in your fridge. Peas are picked ripe and frozen within hours. They lose some vitamin C in the freezing — and then stop losing. The “fresh” ones travelled, sat in the shop, and sat in your fridge five more days. When a University of Georgia team compared them properly in 2017, frozen matched fresh or beat the fresh that had sat in the fridge.

Freezing isn’t the damage. Waiting is.

Why nobody stopped this

Think about who gets paid, and for what. The breeder is paid for a seed that gives more fruit. The farmer is paid by weight. The truck is paid for tomatoes that arrive unbruised. The shop is paid for tomatoes that still look good on Friday.

Not one of them is paid for what’s inside. Nobody can see it, so nobody counts it, and nobody protects it. Davis’s figures run from 1950 to 1999. Across those fifty years it drained away quietly, and as far as I can tell no one ever made that decision.

That last part is my reading, not a finding. The studies show what changed. Why nobody caught it is the best explanation I can find, and I haven’t seen a study that tests it.

One warning, because this is easy to stretch too far. Tasty doesn’t mean healthy — cream and sugar taste wonderful.

What happened to the tomato and the sprout was smaller than that. The same choices took the taste and the goodness away together. Your cooking noticed one of them. It couldn’t notice the other.

The label won’t fix it

If you can’t taste what’s missing, the natural next step is to pay for a label. Organic is where most people land, and for this particular problem it’s the wrong tool.

Start with the part that surprises people: an organic tomato can still be a hybrid tomato. Organic rules cover how a crop is grown, not which seed is planted. You can pay extra for the farming and still carry home the seed that lost its flavour.

Think back to the two plants sharing the same soil — the older variety and the modern one bred for size. The older one came out richer. That gap, between one seed and another, looks wider than anything the label is selling you. Nobody has run the exact test, but put a desi and a hybrid side by side in the same organic field and I’d expect the desi still wins. The seed does more than the farming does.

That doesn’t make organic useless — it answers a different question, and answers it well. A large 2014 review led by Marcin Barański at Newcastle University found organic crops carry less pesticide and less cadmium, a toxic metal that builds up in the body over a lifetime. The same review found more of certain plant chemicals called antioxidants, though earlier reviews found less of a gap there. On vitamins and minerals, the big reviews — from the London School of Hygiene in 2009 and Stanford in 2012 — found no real difference. And nobody has found organic to be worse.

So, in order:

• The seed decides most of the taste and the minerals. It’s settled before anything is planted, and nothing afterwards — no farming method, no freshness, no cooking — brings back what was bred out.
• Time decides most of the vitamins. It’s the only one you actually control.
• The label comes last for this. Not because it’s worthless, but because goodness isn’t what it’s promising you.

What to do tonight

Not much changes, honestly. You’re not going to grow your own tomatoes, and no amount of careful shopping brings back what was lost fifty years ago.

What changes is smaller, and it holds. “Tomato” stops being one word. When a shop names the variety — desi, country, anything sold for its taste rather than its shelf life — that name tells you more than the label printed beside it. When nothing is named, you now know what you’re not being told.

Two things you can use:

• Buy frozen peas without guilt.
• Buy the ugly ones. Cracks, odd shapes and sun marks are a record of weather. They don’t tell you anything about what’s inside. Rot is a different thing and an obvious one: mould, soft brown patches, a sour smell. (Scarred vegetables do spoil faster, so use them first.)

It’s already happening in one aisle. Khapli — the old desi wheat — now sells at around three times the price of ordinary atta. A Maharashtra farmer quoted ₹80 a kilo against ₹30 for ordinary wheat to Mongabay India last year, and branded khapli atta sells for more still. The old seed is back on the shelf, and it’s sold by name.

Vegetables could go the same way. And if you ever find both together — a desi variety, grown organic — that’s the one worth paying more for. The seed decides what’s in it. The label decides what isn’t.

The short version: breeding for size and shelf life took the tomato’s taste and its goodness away together, and no farming label puts them back. The seed decides most of it, time decides the rest — so buy by name, and don’t let vegetables wait.

And cook the curry with desi tomatoes. That part works tonight.

About this article

Tagged Synthesis. The findings on tomatoes, sprouts, minerals, vitamins and organic farming come from the named studies below. The argument about why nobody stopped it, and the ordering of seed, time and label, are the author’s own reading of that evidence. None of the studies below makes that argument.

Glossary

• Desi / country variety — an older local variety, grown and saved by farmers for generations, rather than a modern commercial one.
• Hybrid — a variety made by crossing two chosen parent lines. The seed is bought fresh each season and is usually bred for yield, uniformity and shelf life.
• Cadmium — a toxic metal present in some soils and fertilisers. Crops take it up, and the body stores it for decades.
• Antioxidants — plant chemicals, many of them made to defend the plant against pests and sun, that are being studied for possible effects on human health.
• Khapli — an ancient long-grained wheat (emmer) grown in western India for centuries.

Sources

Most of the journal papers below are behind a paywall; their summaries are free to read.

• Tieman, D., Zhu, G., Resende, M. F. R. Jr, … Klee, H. J. “A chemical genetic roadmap to improved tomato flavor.” Science, vol. 355, pp. 391–394, 2017.
• Powell, A. L. T. et al. “Uniform ripening encodes a Golden 2-like transcription factor regulating tomato fruit chloroplast development.” Science, vol. 336, pp. 1711–1715, 2012.
• Nguyen, C. V. et al. “Tomato GOLDEN2-LIKE transcription factors reveal molecular gradients that function during fruit development and ripening.” The Plant Cell, vol. 26, pp. 585–601, 2014.
• van Doorn, H. E., van der Kruk, G. C., van Holst, G.-J. et al. “The glucosinolates sinigrin and progoitrin are important determinants for taste preference and bitterness of Brussels sprouts.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, vol. 78, pp. 30–38, 1998.
• Charles, D. “From culinary dud to stud: how Dutch plant breeders built our Brussels sprouts boom.” NPR, 30 October 2019.
• Traka, M. and Mithen, R. “Glucosinolates, isothiocyanates and human health.” Phytochemistry Reviews, vol. 8, pp. 269–282, 2009.
• Davis, D. R., Epp, M. D. and Riordan, H. D. “Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 garden crops, 1950 to 1999.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition, vol. 23, pp. 669–682, 2004.
• Davis, D. R. “Declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition: what is the evidence?” HortScience, vol. 44, pp. 15–19, 2009.
• Marles, R. J. “Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: the context of reports of apparent historical declines.” Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, vol. 56, pp. 93–103, 2017.
• Farnham, M. W., Grusak, M. A. and Wang, M. “Calcium and magnesium concentration of inbred and hybrid broccoli heads.” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science, vol. 125, pp. 344–349, 2000.
• Garvin, D. F., Welch, R. M. and Finley, J. W. “Historical shifts in the seed mineral micronutrient concentration of US hard red winter wheat germplasm.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, vol. 86, pp. 2213–2220, 2006.
• Rickman, J. C., Barrett, D. M. and Bruhn, C. M. “Nutritional comparison of fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables. Part 1. Vitamins C and B and phenolic compounds.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, vol. 87, pp. 930–944, 2007.
• Li, L., Pegg, R. B., Eitenmiller, R. R., Chun, J.-Y. and Kerrihard, A. L. “Selected nutrient analyses of fresh, fresh-stored, and frozen fruits and vegetables.” Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, vol. 59, pp. 8–17, 2017.
• Barański, M., Średnicka-Tober, D., Volakakis, N. et al. “Higher antioxidant and lower cadmium concentrations and lower incidence of pesticide residues in organically grown crops: a systematic literature review and meta-analyses.” British Journal of Nutrition, vol. 112, pp. 794–811, 2014. Free to read.
• Dangour, A. D. et al. “Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 90, pp. 680–685, 2009.
• Smith-Spangler, C. et al. “Are organic foods safer or healthier than conventional alternatives? A systematic review.” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 157, pp. 348–366, 2012.
• Mongabay India. “An old grain for bold gain.” July 2025. Free to read.