From a pure nutritional perspective, potatoes aren't even a vegetable. Their just dense balls of starch. When you eat a french fry you're just eating fried starch.

Interesting points from the story:

Quote:

SCIENTISTS now believe that human beings acquired the sense of taste as a way to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants generally taste sweet, harmful ones bitter.



Quote:

A person's food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Babies innately prefer sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending on what the people around them eat.



Quote:

HE New Jersey Turnpike runs through the heart of the flavor industry, an industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants.



The flavor industry being the guys who concoct all these "stuff" so that the food industry can deliver flavor cheaply.

If I ever go psychotic, I'm heading to New Jersey for a little domestic terrorism.

But, the author sticks up for the flavor industry:

Quote:

Some of the most important advances in flavor manufacturing are now occurring in the field of biotechnology. Complex flavors are being made using enzyme reactions, fermentation, and fungal and tissue cultures. All the flavors created by these methods -- including the ones being synthesized by fungi -- are considered natural flavors by the FDA.



And,

Quote:

Grainger had brought a dozen small glass bottles from the lab. After he opened each bottle, I dipped a fragrance-testing filter into it -- a long white strip of paper designed to absorb aroma chemicals without producing off notes. Before placing each strip of paper in front of my nose, I closed my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles. I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sautéed onions, and shrimp. Grainger's most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous -- as if someone in the room were flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, I saw just a narrow strip of white paper and a flavorist with a grin.



Considering the crazy methods of developing food, like fermenting grapes, using yeast so bread rises, domesticizing maize, stuff like cauliflower and broccoli was just mutations of some other vegetable that the Italians thought were pretty and started cultivating, that happened so long ago. It's crossed my mind why we're not still discovering new methods of creating food. But, I guess we are, in research labs in New Jersey.

Good article, but you've got to skim most of it.