Mazourek is one of only a handful university-based researchers in the United States who develops new organic fruits or vegetables. Most of his colleagues, he says, focus primarily on traits like storability and shipability, with flavor further down on the list of priorities.

But if farmers want hardy foods that are easy to grow, consumers want fresh foods that taste good. That’s where chefs can play a huge role, says Lane Selman, an agricultural researcher at Oregon State University. “Plant breeders are really big decision-makers, but sometimes they’re guessing,” she says. “Working with chefs sheds a lot of light on what the final users—the eaters—are going to want.”

The first step in classical plant breeding, Selman explains, is identifying two different plants in the same species with the desired genotypes. “Maybe one has really great disease-resistance and one has fantastic flavor,” she says. Breeders will get the two plants to exchange pollen, save the seeds, and grow them again, picking the most desirable plants from this second generation and planting their seeds. They do this over and over until the traits have stabilized—that is, they always show up when those seeds are planted.

The diversity that can be achieved through classical plant breeding is as impressive as anything food scientists can dream up in a laboratory. For example, Jim Myers, a professor of vegetable breeding and genetics at Oregon State University, created the Indigo, a purple-shouldered variety of tomato with higher levels of antioxidants. Both he and Cornell’s Mazourek have developed habañero peppers that have all the flavor of the original, but none of the heat.

While working with several organic farmers to find a source for disease-resistant potato plants in 2008, Selman recalls, she came across two plant breeders who said they’d developed a new variety that was easy for farmers to grow, produced a lot of tubers, and was less likely to contract common diseases. But when Selman asked about the potatoes’ flavor, they told her, “They taste terrible.”

Why would anyone develop new edibles that are barely edible? The short answer is that priorities in the food system changed after World War II: Grocery stores and large-scale industrial farms wanted foods that looked uniform, could be shipped long distances, and stayed fresh in storage. They wanted plants that produced a high volume of food and could be harvested by machine.

Today, consumer tastes are forcing a change, as more people value food that’s organic or locally sourced—but the system for supplying fruits and vegetables that meet this changing demand has been slow to catch up.

That’s where people like Selman come in. Her work on “culinary breeding” started in 2011, when she organized a tasting event for Frank Morton, an independent plant breeder and the owner of the seed-supply company Wild Garden Seed. Morton had developed several new varieties of red roasting peppers for a farmer, but he had no way of determining which was one was the best of the crop.