Did food lose its flavour, or did we outgrow the taste of childhood?

Across American dinner tables, there is a familiar refrain from older generations: “Tomatoes used to taste like tomatoes.” The lament is not simply nostalgia. Scientific studies back it up.

Supermarket tomatoes today are often bred for long-distance transport and uniform ripening, but that has come at the cost of flavour. Research has shown how refrigeration and cold storage strip away volatile compounds, dulling the aroma and flattening the taste. The memory of a tomato plucked from the backyard in the 1960s is more than sentimentality. It is chemistry.

India’s own story is more layered. Until the early 1990s, the country’s food culture was rooted in seasonal rhythms and local staples. Liberalisation opened up the economy and, with it, the diet. Suddenly, supermarket shelves were filled with imported snacks, carbonated drinks, and ready-to-cook food items, as well as fast food outlets started mushrooming. For many, this was a liberation from monotony. Diets diversified, global flavours entered kitchens, and eating out became a regular part of urban life. But the shift also meant that foods once tied closely to soil and season were increasingly replaced by processed versions designed to survive long journeys and long shelf lives.

Industrialisation had already nudged food in this direction decades earlier. In both India and the West, crop yields became the overriding concern. Flavour was often a casualty. Heirloom varieties gave way to hybrids that could withstand transport and disease. A paper in Trends in Plant Science highlighted how decades of selective breeding have reduced the aromatic compounds that give fruits their complexity. In India, farmers who once grew delicate, flavourful rice or pulses moved toward high-yield hybrids. The harvests were larger, but the taste on the plate was thinner.

Liberalisation accelerated this trend. Trade reforms of the 1990s allowed processed food companies to expand rapidly. Urban diets shifted, as researchers in the Journal of Public Health Research have described, toward packaged snacks, ready-to-eat meals and sugar-laden drinks. Consumers gained in safety, consistency and choice, but often lost in flavour. The palate adapted to blunt, uniform tastes, while traditional slow-cooked meals receded from daily life.

The conviction that food “tasted better before” is therefore not just a romantic yearning. It is rooted in structural change. Food was once consumed close to where it grew, with minimal storage. Vegetables reached kitchens within hours of harvest. Spices were ground fresh. Flavours layered themselves slowly, not through additives or flavour enhancers. That world is difficult to recreate when diets are saturated with industrial foods.

Of course, memory plays its role. Taste is shaped by context as much as chemistry; the appetite of youth, the warmth of a family kitchen, the smell of wood fire. Psychologists note that palates recalibrate: once used to the salt, sugar and fat of processed foods, natural flavours can seem muted. The complaint that food was “better before” is both a biological fact and a cultural memory.

In recent years, a counter-current has begun to grow. In India, boutique farms and organic cooperatives are reviving heritage varieties of rice and millets, marketed as both healthier and more flavourful. Farmers’ markets sell vegetables harvested the same morning. Chefs are reclaiming regional spice blends that are once fading from memory. In the US, too, farmers are reintroducing heritage tomatoes and peaches, prized not for durability but for flavour. These efforts suggest that people not only sense what has been lost, but are willing to pay to taste it again.

So, has food become better or worse? Industrialisation and liberalisation undeniably brought gains in safety, abundance and convenience. They also eroded flavour, narrowed complexity, and changed what the human tongue recognises as normal. Whether this feels like progress or decline depends on which memory you trust: the twenty-four-hour supermarket, or the fruit so ripe it bruises in your hand.

Sources

Klee, H. J., & Tieman, D. M. (2013). Genetic challenges of flavor improvement in tomato. Trends in Plant Science, 18(9), 589–593.

Zhu, G. et al. (2016). Rewiring of the fruit metabolome in tomato breeding. Cell, 167(2), 326–339.

Zhang, B. et al. (2016). Chilling-induced tomato flavor loss is associated with altered volatile synthesis and transcriptome. PNAS, 113(44), 12580–12585.

Pingali, P. (2007). Westernization of Asian diets and the transformation of food systems: Implications for research and policy. Food Policy, 32(3), 281–298.

Baker, P., Friel, S., & Schram, A. (2020). The political economy of unhealthy diets: Trade, investment and corporate power. Journal of Public Health Research, 9(Suppl 1).

Atkin, D. (2013). Trade, Tastes, and Nutrition in India. American Economic Review, 103(5), 1629–1663.