Plant breeders are working with chefs to create better-tasting new varieties of fruits and vegetables.
Michael Mazourek and Dan Barber can trace the roots of their unusual partnership to a winter squash.
A few years ago, Mazourek, a vegetable breeder and professor of plant science at Cornell University, went to the Blue Hill restaurant in New York to sample the dishes that Barber, the chef, had made from the some of Mazourek’s newly bred organic vegetables. He was expecting a good meal, he recalls—after all, he could vouch for the quality of the raw ingredients—but he was blown away by the flavor that Barber and his colleagues had coaxed from the vegetables, particularly a tiny, tan variety of butternut squash called “Honeynut.”