from the I-guess-that's-why-the-bugs-don't-like-them-either dept.
Strawberries tend to be blander and less nutritious when treated with particular pesticides:
Have you ever bitten into a plump, red strawberry, only to find it bland and watery? Certain pesticides might be responsible. A team reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that two common strawberry fungicides can impact cellular mechanisms, creating berries with subdued flavor and sweetness, as well as a lower nutritional value.
The flavor profile of any produce, including berries, is a result of its taste and smell — sweetness often arises from the amount of dissolved glucose or fructose, and a unique aroma comes from volatile compounds, such as esters and terpenes. In addition, many fruits are also full of nutrients, including vitamin C, folic acid and antioxidants. But because fungicides are designed to disrupt the cellular processes of detrimental fungi, they could accidentally interfere with these processes in crops, inhibiting production of these important flavor and nutritional compounds. So, Jinling Diao and colleagues wanted to investigate how two common pesticides used on strawberries — boscalid (BOS) and difenoconazole (DIF) — affect specific molecular pathways in berries.
[...] Looking more closely, the team found that BOS had a direct effect on the regulation of genes involved in cellular pathways related to producing sugars, volatile compounds, nutrients and amino acids. Finally, in a blind taste test, people consistently preferred the untreated strawberries. The researchers say that this work could provide guidance to farmers about the use of pesticides.
The researchers found that, despite having the same size and color of untreated strawberries, the ones treated with the pesticides had lower levels of soluble sugar and nutrients, the sugars were converted into acids, and the amounts of volatile compounds changed, which subdued the taste and aroma.
Journal Reference:
Yuping Liu, Rui Liu, Yue Deng, et al., Insights into the Mechanism of Flavor Loss in Strawberries Induced by Two Fungicides Integrating Transcriptome and Metabolome Analysis, J. Agric. Food Chem. 2023, 71, 8, 3906–3919, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c08157
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 04, @12:09PM (7 children)
Most produce sold in America is designed to look good and travel well. Any flavor is an optional bonus, because the buyer won't notice those things until after they've already parted with their money.
If you can, get some stuff from a local farm or farmer's market, and compare it to what's in your supermarket. You'll notice the difference immediately.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @12:15PM (2 children)
What is interesting about this article is that the final berries for the treated and untreated looked the same, but didn't taste the same, so I think this goes beyond just the shelf attractiveness of it. I've certainly noticed that regular grocery strawberries are bland and frankly not worth buying, but I will definitely try again with something out of the organic section. Farmer's Markets, as you point out, are generally your best option for taste. I have a few strawberry plants in a planter, but I typically don't get many of those. I thought it was deer, but I've caught my hound with his head in the planter!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday April 04, @12:31PM
I only learned fairly recently about the different varieties of strawberries. I had assumed, wrongly, that the soil and growing conditions were the sole factors in the flavor or lack thereof. It turns out that the varieties all taste different, that's on top of the variation for individual varieties in different growing conditions. I realized this when a friend had planted a good number of varieties on his lot to see which types thrived in the conditions he could provide and, of those, which one tasted best. There was a very large difference in both flavor and sweetness between the different types and all the more prominent when you could compare them all side by side.
So now the presence or absence of pesticides has to also be factored in as affecting the quality far as the growing conditions go.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05, @08:21AM
Try that comparing with a few thousand strawberries and you might find there are a lot fewer untreated strawberries "on the shelf". That's what the fungicides are for - to stop the fungi from "eating" the strawberries.
The fungicides aren't free and the farmers aren't paying for them just to poison customers with bland strawberries.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @02:04PM
They sometimes sell something here they call "Blueberries". They are grotesquely large and taste nothing like actual blueberries. They are known as american blueberries cause they have nothing in common with the real thing.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @04:48PM (2 children)
Many of the more popular "farmer's markets" have been effectively ruined by enterprising individuals who buy produce from the exact same suppliers as the supermarkets, remove all the labels and packaging, then sell them at inflated prices.
Around here the berry farms do sell directly to individuals so with that approach you can be a bit more sure what you're getting. The local farms only have strawberries for about 1 month of each year though. During that month normally the supermarkets will carry strawberries from at least one of the local farms too, which are usually just as fine.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 04, @08:54PM
Where I live they don't even bother, its the same cardboard trays you'll see at the food store. Kind of crazy.
Prices at the farmers market are higher than store prices because the city started cracking down on this revenue source, a stall at the farmers market was like $500 per season, so they kind of have to be more expensive than the same product at the store.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 04, @11:59PM
Yes, it depends on the actual seller quite a lot. In my rural area, I have a farm stand next door to me, so that makes it pretty easy to see where the produce is coming from. In some of my urban areas, there are known urban agriculture projects and the like active, so those also can be easy to check out.
But you definitely won't get what these plants are supposed to taste like from your local big box retailer.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @01:39PM (2 children)
But... but... they swore to us that organic food was just a fad without any tastable difference, and that we should welcome with open arms pesticide-tolerant GMO!
Yeah, sure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GloomMower on Tuesday April 04, @01:51PM (1 child)
I hate to break it to you, but foods classified as organic can also use a list of synthetic and natural pesticides. I do not see BOS or DIF on the list though, so someone maybe needs to do similar experiments with some of the allow fungicides in the organic list. If it tastes better for you, then keep going for it.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 04, @05:21PM
I'll add: I recently worked in a food processing factory. There were several product lines, and I worked mostly in soda production. Everything was USDA organic, but I learned that they (FDA/USDA) allow trace amounts of things that aren't truly "organic".
That said, there are many things in nature that will make you sick, if not outright kill you, yet are still "organic".
One trace inorganic ingredient I know of is well-known to be completely biologically inert. IIRC silicones, again, trace amounts. There was an anti-foaming agent of which an ounce (~30 ml) or so would treat 2000 gallons (~7500 liters) of product. It was stunningly expensive for the small bottles it came in. It was never used in the time I was there.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 04, @02:05PM (6 children)
Silly me, I thought my strawberries were bland because they were picked green, shipped 1,500 miles, artificially ripened with Ethylene gas, and refrigerated to prevent the starch from converting to simple (tastable) sugars.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @02:53PM (3 children)
I'm not too well versed in biology, but doesn't the ripening process, even under the influence of ethylene gas, convert starches to sugars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @05:27PM (1 child)
Please re-read her post. It contains your answer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04, @06:20PM
I disagree, or at least the answer is ambiguous on that point. Cold temperatures inhibit ripening enzymes from activation so you don't do your ethylene ripening at cold temperatures. You transport cold because that slows the starch to sugar conversion, but you hit it with ethylene at the other end to accelerate the ripening process, which does convert starch to sugar.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 04, @05:45PM
In addition to temperature effects, you can let your saliva convert starch to sugars, but most people don't eat that slowly and are much more satisfied with the "instant taste gratification" of sugars hitting their tastebuds directly.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 04, @05:43PM (1 child)
Well, yes, it's all that and fungicides too.
We're having a fair amount of success with growing strawberries in a hydroponic tower. That and lettuce, and you can only eat so much lettuce...
The strawberries do best out in the direct sun (duh) and even are clearly more productive on the south side of the tower than the north, even though the north side gets some direct sun it's not as much (latitude 30).
Of course, being outside, the strawberries are also attractive to all kinds of wildlife, birds, etc. even up on the relatively protected tower you need to get them before the critters do.
There are some local professional growers who produce absolutely awesome huge, sweet and flavorful strawberries, but they're rare, and never seen in our Florida grocery stores - our grocers carry those "low spoilage" varieties.
I was surprised at the fruit in markets in New York City, they actually care what their produce tastes like and have good distribution (not to mention firehose throughput of product) so their fresh fruit is really really tasty when compared with "regular" city groceries.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday April 07, @11:19PM
I grow them in our rural location in southern Australia and they taste great straight off the plant. Supermarket varieties are just “ok” to “poor” at best. Often the shop ones are green on top and they are the worst.
I only put netting over the top to stop the rosellas and cockatoos getting into them. Otherwise I am also competing with snails and slugs. But I figure, some for the bugs, some for us.
There is a commercial farm near here where the public can pick your own and that is usually really good. So I think most of the loss of taste is in picking at sub optimal times and transport +processing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Tuesday April 04, @09:46PM
Not so much recently, but for a few years running I became a bit of a strawberry connoisseur, waiting for late winter early Spring. Mexican berries come first and they're OK. The peak strawberry was organic, and labeled as being from Watsonville, CA although they're probably not grown within city limits (duh). Sadly they've had too much rain this year and strawberries got tainted with flood waters. There was a story on the local news just a day or so ago, showing them picking off all the damaged berries and composting them. That's going to jack the price up sky high, just like when the lettuce got hit by a hard freeze or salmonella or whatever. This is probably not the year to sample berries.
Strawberries, FWIW, is one of the foods they tell you where organic matters. Conventional berries are absolutely hammered with pesticides. I don't know how they grow the organics. They probably stretch the rules as much as they can, but at least you don't have to scrub the flavor off your berries to know they're not upping your odds of cancer.
I also have no idea why the Watsonville berries were best. It might be some totally subjective reason, like them coming in to season when I was in the right frame of mind. Hard to tell, I just know they were so full of flavor.
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