I understand conceptually that identical varieties of food crops can taste different depending on where they’re grown due to climate and soil, resulting in “terroire.” I’d like to better understand from the perspective of the plant’s biological mechanisms how environmental stress causes plants to react in a way that changes chemicals which we interpret as complex, nuanced flavors. What’s happening in the plant? Could we reproduce it if we kept the plant under climate control and mimicked the humidity, rain schedule, light and temperature, or would we also need to keep the plant in a pot of soil that came from the region? Would we need to mimic pests to trigger the plant to produce more anti-pest defenses that may contain flavors we find desirable? Or is it more cause ambiguous than this?
In: Biology
Latest Answers