Breed it for me

The taste of a particular food is relevant to how much and how often we eat it. Well, I do eat root tubers mainly cassava, sweet potatoes, yams as often as when I chance on them listed on a menu or when they are plenty and cheap, especially during their harvest seasons.

I am particular about their taste, colour, firmness and sometimes the shape.
When I am in the market buying cassava or sweetpotatoes, I select straight ones, which are easy to peel. I love the orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, but I also prefer that they are not too soft or too sweet.

Often times in my journalism work I meet breeders, and the amount of work, time and energy plant breeders put into breeding for me as a consumer is just amazing. It’s called breeding for the end user.

Through research they try and get the right product for me. For instance, when I talked to sweet potato breeders they told me they consider the colour, shape, size, sweetness and firmness to satisfy my taste buds.

They have researched and know that as asweet potato consumer in East Africa that is how I want to eat them. If I lived in West Africa, the sweet potatoes to my preference would be dry, not sweet and curvy. Why? The sauce used to eat with it is salty.

Yet they also have to consider the bigger factors like the variety being drought-tolerant, pest- and disease-resistant, high-yielding, have a long shelf life and grow fast so that farmers also .

How they can achieve all that in one type of sweet potato, cassava or yam may not be possible. But like I said, first they consider me mostly the end user. I will be the one buying it from the farmers who brings it to the market.

Just eating to my taste makes my day.