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Comment by lisivka | Hacker News Reader

Optimize for taste, not for fast growth, please. I don't want to pay for lettuce with taste of straw.

Yes, this is a must. I wonder if industrial greenhouses could benefit from some sort of induced day-night cycles and thermal gradients to cuddle the little plants. Maybe it will allow them to grow better and to develop a better taste. Once you have LEDs possibilities are many.

Last time I checked (it's been a while since I had a salad), lettuce already doesn't have too much of a taste. I'd be surprised if they managed to mess that up.

It really depends on the lettuce.

Iceburg seems to be intentionally useless. Romaine starts to have a little flavor. Leaf lettuces have a wide range of flavors.

Iceberg is a texture, not a taste per se. Used in combination with other greens and veggies it has a place.

Moving to California recalibrated my understanding of lettuce/salad greens. Not sure if you meant just lettuce, but in California a typical salad has little to no lettuce, and instead: mizuna, arugula, radicchio. What lettuce is does have is Romaine and butter lettuce, not iceberg.

The result is a very flavorful salad- intensely bitter with much less crunch.

is that the outcome of nature or selective breeding?

I'm not optimistic here. At scale, cost always wins. Look what Hershey did in the US to its brand also Cadbury when they licensed it: that pasty brown wax is just not appealing compared to the real thing.

http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2008/09/chocolate-cocoa-butter...

Taste is a really difficult thing to optimize for due to the subjective nature. There are certainly specific chemicals that appear in really tasty food that can be analyzed and used to guide the breeding process but it's incredibly complicated.

Optimizing for anecdotal data is one of the things I'm working on, it's amazing the depth you need in selecting specific traits to breed into plants.

>Taste is a really difficult thing to optimize for due to the subjective nature.

No one tastes locally grown produce and thinks, "this is OK, but I really prefer the flavor of the produce that's genetically engineered to not bruise as easily in shipping."

Well yeah absolutely, I'm saying it's a qualitative trait as opposed to yield per acre which is quantitative.

If you're going to for taste then maybe go for another salad than lettuce though :)

Seems like you haven't tasted great lettuce! Try one grown in Finland, it'll blow your mind. I miss Finnish vegetables more than anything else!

Or maybe I have and I can recognize that lettuce is one of the blandest greens around. Treviso, watercress, frisée, oak-leaf have way more taste and also offer better texture.

Yeah dude, you should convince them to waste the opportunity to make billions.

You think billions is cool.... No, thousands is cool.

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