LogFAQs > #931658518

So every human being on Earth has been doing the whole "derp Brussels sprouts are delicious what's wrong with you" act these last couple of years and I have been trying to uncover the conspiracy.

Today I have found it.

https://www.npr.org/773457637

For many years, they were scorned. Even Steve Bontadelli admits it, and he makes his living growing them. "A lot of people of my generation hated them," he says. "Their moms boiled them and made them even stinkier."

Bontadelli's farm is near Santa Cruz, Calif., where the weather is perfect for growing this vegetable. "We actually had a Brussels sprouts festival here for about 10 years," he says. "And we got a lot of free press out of the deal, because people couldn't believe that you'd have a festival for Brussels sprouts."

What's worse, they even deserved their bad reputation. "They were just very bitter; a very strong bitter taste," Bontadelli says.

This all started to change in the 1990s, and it began in the Netherlands, where Brussels sprouts have a simpler name: spruitjes. A Dutch scientist named Hans van Doorn, who worked at the seed and chemical company Novartis (the seed part is now called Syngenta), figured out exactly which chemical compounds in spruitjes made them bitter.

At that point, the small handful of companies that sell Brussels sprouts seeds started searching their archives, looking for old varieties that happen to have low levels of the bitter chemicals.

One of the companies, also based in the Netherlands, is Bejo Zaden. "We have a whole gene bank here in our cellars, with all the possible Brussels sprouts varieties that were available from the past," says Cees Sintenie, a plant breeder at Bejo Zaden.

There are hundreds of these old varieties. The companies grew them in test plots, and they did, in fact, find some that weren't as bitter. They cross-pollinated these old varieties with modern, high-yielding ones, trying to combine the best traits of old and new spruitjes. It took many years. But it worked. "From then on, the taste was much better. It really improved," Sintenie says.

In your face, global population.

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