The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [90]
Okay, but how did it taste?
My jet-setting Argentine asparagus tasted like damp cardboard. After the first spear or two no one touched it. Perhaps if it had been sweeter and tenderer we would have finished it, but I suspect the fact that asparagus was out of place in a winter supper made it even less appetizing. Asparagus is one of a dwindling number of foods still firmly linked in our minds to the seasonal calendar.
All the other vegetables and greens were much tastier—really good, in fact. Whether they would have been quite so sweet and bright after a cross-country truck ride is doubtful, though the Earthbound greens, in their polyethylene bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field—no small technological feat. The inert gases, scrupulous cold chain and space-age plastic bag (which allows the leaves to respire just enough) account for much of this longevity, but some of it, as the Goodmans had explained to me, owes to the fact that the greens were grown organically. Since they’re not pumped up on synthetic nitrogen, the cells of these slower-growing leaves develop thicker walls and take up less water, making them more durable.
And, I’m convinced, tastier, too. When I visited Greenways Organic, which grows both conventional and organic tomatoes, I learned that the organic ones consistently earn higher Brix scores (a measure of sugars) than the same varieties grown conventionally. More sugars means less water and more flavor. It stands to reason the same would hold true for other organic vegetables: slower growth, thicker cell walls, and less water should produce more concentrated flavors. That at least has always been my impression, though in the end freshness probably affects flavor even more than growing method.
TO SERVE such a scrupulously organic meal begs an unavoidable question: Is organic food better? Is it worth the extra cost? My Whole Foods dinner certainly wasn’t cheap, considering I made it from scratch: Rosie cost $15 ($2.99 a pound), the vegetables another $12 (thanks to that six-buck bunch of asparagus), and the dessert $7 (including $3 for a six-ounce box of blackberries). Thirty-four dollars to feed a family of three at home. (Though we did make a second meal from the leftovers.) Whether organic is better and worth it are certainly fair, straightforward questions, but the answers, I’ve discovered, are anything but simple.
Better for what? is the all-important corollary to that question. If the answer is “taste,” then the answer is, as I’ve suggested, very likely, at least in the case of produce—but not necessarily. Freshly picked conventional produce is bound to taste better than organic produce that’s been riding the interstates in a truck for three days. Meat is a harder call. Rosie was a tasty bird, yet, truth be told, not quite as tasty as Rocky, her bigger nonorganic brother. That’s probably because Rocky is an older chicken, and older chickens generally have more flavor. The fact that the corn and soybeans in Rosie’s diet were grown without chemicals probably doesn’t change the taste of her meat. Though it should be said that Rocky and Rosie both taste more like chicken than mass-market birds fed on a diet of antibiotics and animal by-products, which makes for mushier and blander meat. What’s in an animal’s feed naturally affects how it will taste, though whether that feed is organic or not probably makes no difference.
Better for what?