The Future Promise of Heirloom Fruit
Link to the “Peach Varieties Guide” shown above. There are a large number of known varieties of peaches.
One of my students asked me, partly in jest, if I had any entrepreneurial ideas for getting rich. I said I thought I had one. Our culture is gradually getting clear that sugar is very, very bad for you. And at some point people will realize that the sugar in fruit is a problem, too. My prediction is that, 20 years from now, low-sugar varieties of fruit will be a thing, and that getting in early in growing and distributing low-sugar varieties of fruit could be a good business move.
My quick summary about fruit is that the sugar in it is quite bad, and the other stuff in fruit is really good for you. So for health, what we need is low-sugar fruit. And it is easy for a grower to both select low-sugar varieties and to breed fruit to have even lower levels of sugar.
Because, commercially, only a few varieties of fruit dominate the market, everything else, by count almost all varieties of edible fruit, count as “heirloom fruit.” Because the market so far has selected for and bred varieties of fruit with high levels of sugar, and made those varieties especially common in stores, many heirloom varieties have lower levels of sugar than the varieties in the store. (Of course, the most popular heirloom varieties could be exactly those that have even higher levels of sugar than those in the store, but say are harder to grow.)
Even among varieties that are easily available commercially, there can be big differences in sugar content. For an example, see “Nutritionally, Not All Apple Varieties Are Alike.”
People not only should start caring about the sugar in fruit, I think that they will. Right now, the myth is that sugar in fruit is innocent. That is a pleasant illusion that will persist for a while, but is bound to crumple under the weight of its implausibility within a few years. Then interest in low-sugar fruit will pick up.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: