Fruit Is Too Sweet - The Atlantic

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If it is possible, in this fascinating age, to be a celebrity fruit, the Sumo Citrus is definitely a celebrity fruit. The mandarin-satsuma-orange hybrid, originally developed in Japan and brought to American grocery stores in 2011, is by far the most popular new member of the citrus family, accounting for almost a third of the entire sector’s recent growth. This winter, like the winter before, my local Trader Joe’s displayed piles of them in prime position, and many times the store would be half sold-out before sunset. Sumos are discovered anew every season on social media, where people talk about their adorable bumpy heads, their generous size, and—oh!—their sweetness.<br>Of course. As soon as you taste one, you understand. The eye-widening, tongue-coating syrupyness; the sticky dribble down your chin; the sensation of eating candy that is, somehow, also fruit, a feeling that is a teeny tiny bit like you are robbing a bank at breakfast. Food scientists measure sweetness using the Brix scale, which indicates the percentage of a given dissolved solid (sugar, basically) in a fruit’s juice. The average grocery-store mandarin orange—the kind that lived, oblivious and happy, in fruit bowls across the United States until relatively recently; the kind that doesn’t have a robust online fandom—falls somewhere from 8 to 11 degrees Brix. Sumos have been known to reach up to 18.<br>Read: The fruit aisle is getting trippy<br>The American grocery-store produce aisle is sweeter than it has ever been, crammed full of fruit a lot like the Sumo, created for an eating public that has repeatedly demonstrated it wants sweet, and will pay for it. Driscoll’s Sweetest Batch berries are notably sweeter (and notably more expensive) than the company’s traditional ones; last year, they accounted for $400 million in sales. Fresh Del Monte, meanwhile, has the Honeyglow, a pineapple that bears the slogan “When we say sweet, we mean sweet.” Cotton Candy grapes are a $100 million concern, one that now has competition from a slew of other designer grapes with similarly ultra-sweet flavor profiles and kindercore, trademarked names: Candy Heart, Sweet Sapphire, Gum Drops.<br>But even the non-name-brand fruit is sweeter than it used to be, and is getting a little more so all the time. This year’s Sweetest Batch will be regular-degular grocery-store berries in five years, and the Sweetest Batch will be replaced by an even-sweeter-est batch—sugar bombs, everywhere you look, enabled in equal part by scientific advancement and by consumer appetite. Today’s grapefruit are less bitter than the ones your grandparents ate, having had the naringin—the compound that creates bitterness—largely cultivated out of them. Stone fruits are being bred for sweetness too.<br>The chef and cookbook author Alison Roman told me that she recently noticed that the blueberries she was feeding her toddler were sweet and wan, with no acidity. Claire Saffitz, another recipe developer, has found something similar with contemporary watermelon: “so incredibly sweet,” she told me, but also, somehow, less watermelony. Some years ago, zookeepers in Melbourne noticed something alarming—the red pandas in their care were developing tooth decay. The problem, as it turned out, was this: The zookeepers were feeding the animals commercial fruit in an attempt to mimic the diet they’d have in the wild, and it was so high in sugar that it was rotting their little teeth. Humans had manipulated nature to such a degree that nature could not keep up.<br>Sweetest Batch, Sumo, and just about every other fruit on the market are the products of selective breeding—the tedious, iterative work of smushing different varietals’ DNA together over and over, letting the desirable genes survive and the less desirable ones die off. That process is playing out all across the industry. “They’re starting to premium-ize the best, and then that raises the whole,” Courtney Weber, a berry horticulturist at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, told me. “Everything is just getting better.”<br>Better can mean bigger, brighter, more nutritious, more disease resistant—but in the grocery store, better typically means sweeter. In this country, at least, people tend to choose sweet fruit when given the choice, and these days people have many more choices than they used to. In 1862—when Henry David Thoreau described wild apples in this magazine as “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream”—fruit was just something that grew on trees, not a multibillion-dollar global business. To the degree that people ate farmed fruit at all, they got it from small farms, with breeding operations that were casual and relatively unscientific.<br>But over time, the industry grew, farming was professionalized, and the product was standardized. More recently, varietals became lucrative intellectual property (hence all those trademarks), and for-profit breeders...