Machine learning is making fruits and vegetables more delicious

There's a reason so much of the produce sold in the grocery store often tastes like cardboard. Actually, there are several reasons. Most of them stem from the fact that tastiness is far down on the list of what the food industry encourages plant breeders to prioritize when developing new varieties -- called "cultivars" -- of produce. When they do want to focus on taste, breeders don't have good tools for quickly sampling the fruit from thousands of cultivars. In a surprising new paper, researchers at the University of Florida describe a new method for "tasting" produce based on its chemical profile.