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Are Your Strawberries Bland? Pesticides Could be to Blame
Strawberries tend to be blander and less nutritious when treated with particular pesticides [acs.org]:
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 [doi.org]
