Penny thinks traditional varieties are underrated:
Where Hawaii’s research stations and taro farmers practice good soil husbandry, timely harvests and plant stock culling practices, traditional taro varieties thrive. An old Hawaiian saying – nana i ke kumu; look to the source.
This was in reply to a Brainfood snippet on a recent paper by Vincent Lebot and colleagues: “Adapting clonally propagated crops to climatic changes: a global approach for taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott).”
Results indicated that hybrids tolerant to taro leaf blight (TLB, Phytophthora colocasiae Raciborski), developed by Hawaii, Papua New Guinea and Samoa breeding programmes outperformed local cultivars in most locations.
Real cultivation must include soil, seeds, water and fertiliser, all of such a quality, which can be used to produce food for consumption of living beings. Some developments may look better than this process but in the long run these methods will become futile as the produces will cause destructive effects on the living beings.
So it is better to examine the yield than to apply those recently discovered methods as accepted methods of agriculture.
It should be noted very carefully that the farmers and the Agriculturists only are unable to find the effect of some agricultural produce on living beings.
Some flavours of dessert tofu are pretty good (it’s one of the few things here that comes in taro flavour). I don’t know if there’s a chocolate flavour, though.