Our past as hunters and gatherers has left us with distinctive taste in food. We like it fresh. An animal or vegetable that was living and growing only a few minutes ago has quite a different taste to one that has been stored. Many foods, from sprouts to fish, lose their pleasant flavour very quickly. Even the British diet would be delightful if it were fresh. But in bulk farming, a large amount of food is harvested at the same time and is then stored. This is clearly at variance with our animal nature. But this type of farming is highly efficient, and so has sadly become a fact of life.
While an animal or vegetable is alive, its immune system protects its evanescent compounds or regenerates them. When it dies, all this stops. Bacterial attack, crosslinking and decomposition all start at once. Freezing, that brutal attempt to stop the clock, seems to work best with the bulk components. One food-processing company claims to freeze its vegetable product within 2 hours of picking it, hoping to trap the brief trace compounds of freshness while they last. Daedalus also recalls how the makers of instant coffee put a key flavour volatile in the space at the top of each jar, so the illusion of the real thing survives at least for a moment. DREADCO biochemists are now studying the trace compounds present in fresh foodstuffs.
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