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| While Cracked ain't what it used to be (what is, though?), here, have a bite of this: It should go without saying that "mutated" is a bit misleading, but here I am, saying it anyway. We know that companies keep tinkering with the recipes behind processed foods, changing nitrates or benzoates so you’ll become as addicted as possible. Wow, that would suck, becoming addicted to food. More basic foods, however, are more dependable. And, of course, here's the countdown list to contradict that. 5 Brussels Sprouts A couple decades ago, jokes on kids’ shows would keep saying something or another about a character hating Brussels sprouts. Pretty sure it was more than a couple of decades ago. But the Brussels sprouts thing didn't stick in my memory. Broccoli did. Of course, as I got older and didn't have to eat them the way my mom overcooked them, I learned to like both. And when I got even older, I had my mind blown with the fact that they are the same species. If you were around back then, you probably learned that Brussels sprouts tasted gross before you’d ever heard of the city of Brussels. Having been to Brussels, I still don't know what they call them there. Sprouts, probably, or whatever the French or Dutch word for sprouts is. like how Canadian bacon is called bacon (or backbacon) in Canada, or French fries are called frites in Brussels because they're a Belgian invention, not French. Unlike French fries, Brussels sprouts actually have a connection to Brussels. Well, not the city. It's hard to find extensive vegetable gardens in most major cities. But they were grown extensively in the surrounding countryside, or so I've heard. Brussels sprouts used to taste bitter, but during the 1990s, we started crossbreeding them with variants that didn’t. When we were done, we’d bred the bitterness out. There's an incident stuck in my head from several years ago, back when I did my own grocery shopping so at least six years and probably more, where I sauntered up to a supermarket checkout counter with a big bag of Brussels sprouts. The cashier started to ring me up, but then she looked me in the eye and said, "Can I ask you a question?" "Sure." She held up the bag o' sprouts. "How can you eat these things?" I was rendered speechless for a moment, but retained enough presence of mind to say "With butter and garlic." Or maybe I just sputtered, and then a week or so later, lying awake at night, I finally came up with a good comeback, and edited my memory to make me look better. Turns out there’s no moral law saying healthy stuff must taste bad. Shhh, you can't say that in the US. 4 Pistachios Pistachio nuts in stores used to always be red. I don't think I ever noticed that. Today, we instead associate pistachios with the color green, due to the light green color of the nuts and the deeper green color of the unripe shells. I associate them with a lot of work and messy cleanup, but damn, they taste good. 3 Jalapeños In the 1990s, the word “jalapeño” was synonymous with spicy. Again, this is a US-oriented site. For many Americans, mayonnaise is too spicy, and anything else is way too spicy. Today? Not so much. Maybe you’d call a habanero spicy, but jalapeños are so mild, you can eat a pile of them. That's... not entirely true. It's actually worse than that; jalapeños have wildly varying levels of capsaicin, making it difficult to control the flavor of one's concoction when using that particular species. Today, you might find yourself with one of the other many hotter jalapeño varieties, but there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself with TAM II or something similarly watery. Which is why, when I want spicy peppers, I go with habanero or serrano. No, I don't use whole ghost peppers, but I do use ghost pepper sauce sometimes. 2 Sriracha Sauce You know Sriracha sauce? Its label says that the primary ingredient is “chili,” and the chili pepper they use happens to be a type of jalapeño. At least it used to be, until some recent shenanigans. I know it, and I sometimes use it, but my tongue refuses to pronounce it. It has no problem tasting it, though. 1 Apples I don't think it would surprise many people to know that this iconic fruit has been selectively bred into hundreds of different varieties. The most extreme victim of this aesthetics supremacy may be the Red Delicious apple. Today, it’s perhaps the most perfect-looking apple. It looks like it’s made of wax, and many say it tastes like it’s made of wax, too. Nah, more like cardboard. I know what cardboard tastes like because I ate a pizza from Domino's once. Buyers have started rebelling. If you aren’t satisfied with Red Delicious, you can try the increasingly popular Gala or Fuji apples. On the rare occasions that I actually buy apples for eating, those are my choices, because they're tasty and they're usually available. In summary, yeah, lots of foods have changed, and sometimes for the worse. What's remarkable isn't the change itself, but our ability to tinker with the genetics of what we eat. And we've been doing it for as long as we've been cultivating food. We can be quite clever, sometimes. But I question our collective taste. |
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