The Taste-Of-The-Past From Ancient Landraces. How Modern Non-Organic Breeding Has Affected Aroma Quality In Peppers And Tomatoes

Summary

Organic production in many areas of the world are mainly based in modern F1 varieties, particularly vegetables, which have been bred for more intensive, high input production systems, instead to more sustainable/organic systems. In addition, these varieties have been mainly bred for yield, resistances and uniformity, to the detriment of quality and increasing genetic erosion due to the loss of agrobiodiversity. However, nowadays there is an opportunity for ancient landraces and for small and medium farmers in the frame of organic productions systems, as they are expected to show a better adaptation to low-input conditions like organic systems than modern varieties, but also as they may also provide the “taste-of-the-past” that modern varieties lack. In this regard, some studies have revealed that sugars and acids have been lost in most modern varieties of vegetables, but there is not much knowledge about what happened with the volatile fraction, responsible of both aroma and whole flavour during mastication. In the present work we compared the volatile fraction of several varieties of ancient landraces and modern varieties from Oxheart tomatoes and Jalapeno and Numex peppers. Our results indicate that within each varietal type modern breeding has provoked a remarkable loss of volatiles at both qualitative and quantitative levels, which indicates that the tastier flavour and more intense aroma of ancient landraces is mainly due to a richer volatile fraction.