[Ag-eq] Taste

[Jewel]

A few days ago on my New Zealand Blind Gardeners list, I said how revolting I found tammarillos, and 
others leapt to the defence of the vile fruit to say that they were delicious!
About a week ago, there was a program on the tb re taste and what an important role it plays in the 
scheme of things.
Plants that bear fruit and depend on animals:  and that includes the species homo:  to spread far 
and wide the future generation, being the cargo of seeds that the fruit carries, make good use of 
animals' liking for sweetness and make sure that by changing the colour of the fruit to an 
eye-catching one, red often, but not always, at the same time, it becomes sweet.
This, of course, or, it is "of course" to me, leaves the question of how such sour fruits as lemons, 
limes and grapefruit manage to reproduce so I leave it to those who have more knowledge than I of 
these things to enlighten us all on that.
However, things are not always as they appear;  take the strawberry for example.
The strawberry is that eye-catching red, but it remains sour, which may come as a surprise to many. 
The strawberry has developed a clever trick whereby, although it is, essentially, sour, it produces 
a chemical which tricks the animal's taste buds into believing that it is full of sugar.
When these gullible taste buds were being handed out, my historic forebears must have been absent 
because strawberries, even when liberally coated with icing sugar, always taste sour to me, much to 
the wonderment of my hostess as she serves up a dessert decorated with luscious strawberries!
Now moving on from sugar or sugar taste alikes, we come to the deadly poison, solaneine or however 
it is spelled.  This is the poison that makes green potatoes so bitter and, nigh on impossible to 
eat, which is a good thing for as I said, solaneine or however it is spelled is  deadly.
However, potatoes were the staple food of the ancient Incas who lived in the high Andes of peru and 
the potato was the only food plant that would, reliably, produce at that altitude.
How did these ancient peoples get around the solaneine problem?  In this way:
  The potatoes were dug green and stored in large pits.  At night, the temperature plummetted to 
well below zero and the potatoes were frozen solid, As with many things, freezing caused the potato 
to expand and the skin split.
When the sun rose and the potatoes began to thaw, the solanein poison leached out through the breaks 
in the skin.
This process of regular freezing and thawing went on week after week, until what was left were 
freeze-dried chips that didn't contain a trace of poison.
Now wasn't that fascinating?
As I have included two of my essentially American lists, just a word about tammarillos.  I have no 
idea what you might call them.  In New Zealand, they used to be called tree tomatos but I don't 
think that you would know them under either name.  Amazon's Alexa in the guise of Bola Bot may be 
able to tell you, but I doubt it, but good old reliable Google will probably be able to provide you 
with 10,000,000 hits that will.
          Jewel