I love pomegranates and eat one daily when it costs a dollar each. But in recent years, I have been finding that the pomegranates are 'too sweet' and don't have even one bit of tartness in them. The high degree of sweetness seems nice for a while but now I am not relishing it as much. I now long for the tart pomegranates we got decades ago in India.
The same goes for the oranges and musambis and countless variety of fruits, vegetables and greens of today in Canada , USA and maybe India too.
There is not one bit of tartness(sour) in the oranges. It tastes like sugar instead of a citrus fruit.
The apples too don't taste like the apples I recall eating as a child but have a fragrance like another fruit.
The fruits and vegetables of today are different from their 'ancestors'. They are bigger and I don't know if this is a good thing; and they definitely lack the flavour they had in the past. I recall the fresh coriander leaves sold on the street in Jayanagar 4th block of Bangalore. I could smell the coriander from a distance of 5 feet but the huge coriander bunches I buy in Canada, look great...larger leaves, longer stems but NO 'coriander-smell' at all !
The same goes for peanuts and pumpkin I taste and smell here. They are simply bigger but have neither the fragrance or the flavour of the fruits and vegetables and nuts of India of the 70s and 80s.
These fruits, vegetables, greens, nuts and everything else of today are all genetically modified, hybrid stuff. Why this desire for people to make hybrid of everything? Why breed out the tart, sour and bitter and make everything sweet or bland? Oranges were meant to be tart, NOT sweet! Bitter Gourd was meant to be bitter, not unbitter.
Are modern people allergic to nature? Do they want to modify nature of every single thing on earth? It is the so called imperfections or differences which make each fruit, vegetable, nut, plant and animal, 'natural', unique and wonderful. Why do these scientists have the idea that all things, have to be big, colorful, sweet, or whatever their idea of perfection is. Why cannot they accept nature as it is ? Why can't they love things without this intense need to change them into something else?
I have now reached the stage of not being able to appreciate the flowers (tulips, daffodils) anymore . Every year, they come out with bigger, more colourful and a huge variety of flowers. But they now look too good, too fantastic to be natural to me and I am reaching a stage in my life when I want natural, even if it looks simple and ordinary. The new flowers look fake and garish. To me there's beauty in imperfections...the small and scrawny flowers, with withering petals, assymetrical flowers due to petals having fallen off or eaten by insects are beautiful too.
I recall a farmer in north Ontario who gave up growing flowers commercially. He told the buyers kept rejecting many flowers as they were 'imperfect'. He asked me, why does the modern world have such exacting demands of perfection from nature? I agree with him.
There is no end to people's demands for bigger, better and 'more perfect' as we are never satiated and expectations go up and never go down. People become jaded with the old and want something newer or 'better' than before. There is a whole lot of destructive psychology in this and I am not going into that today.
The same goes for the oranges and musambis and countless variety of fruits, vegetables and greens of today in Canada , USA and maybe India too.
There is not one bit of tartness(sour) in the oranges. It tastes like sugar instead of a citrus fruit.
The apples too don't taste like the apples I recall eating as a child but have a fragrance like another fruit.
The fruits and vegetables of today are different from their 'ancestors'. They are bigger and I don't know if this is a good thing; and they definitely lack the flavour they had in the past. I recall the fresh coriander leaves sold on the street in Jayanagar 4th block of Bangalore. I could smell the coriander from a distance of 5 feet but the huge coriander bunches I buy in Canada, look great...larger leaves, longer stems but NO 'coriander-smell' at all !
The same goes for peanuts and pumpkin I taste and smell here. They are simply bigger but have neither the fragrance or the flavour of the fruits and vegetables and nuts of India of the 70s and 80s.
These fruits, vegetables, greens, nuts and everything else of today are all genetically modified, hybrid stuff. Why this desire for people to make hybrid of everything? Why breed out the tart, sour and bitter and make everything sweet or bland? Oranges were meant to be tart, NOT sweet! Bitter Gourd was meant to be bitter, not unbitter.
Are modern people allergic to nature? Do they want to modify nature of every single thing on earth? It is the so called imperfections or differences which make each fruit, vegetable, nut, plant and animal, 'natural', unique and wonderful. Why do these scientists have the idea that all things, have to be big, colorful, sweet, or whatever their idea of perfection is. Why cannot they accept nature as it is ? Why can't they love things without this intense need to change them into something else?
I have now reached the stage of not being able to appreciate the flowers (tulips, daffodils) anymore . Every year, they come out with bigger, more colourful and a huge variety of flowers. But they now look too good, too fantastic to be natural to me and I am reaching a stage in my life when I want natural, even if it looks simple and ordinary. The new flowers look fake and garish. To me there's beauty in imperfections...the small and scrawny flowers, with withering petals, assymetrical flowers due to petals having fallen off or eaten by insects are beautiful too.
I recall a farmer in north Ontario who gave up growing flowers commercially. He told the buyers kept rejecting many flowers as they were 'imperfect'. He asked me, why does the modern world have such exacting demands of perfection from nature? I agree with him.
There is no end to people's demands for bigger, better and 'more perfect' as we are never satiated and expectations go up and never go down. People become jaded with the old and want something newer or 'better' than before. There is a whole lot of destructive psychology in this and I am not going into that today.
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