The fascinating story of how a plant breeder created a sweet, shrunken butternut squash
butternut squash
and said: “If you’re such a good breeder, why don’t you make this thing taste good? Why don’t you shrink the thing?!” It was kismet, because Mazourek, an associate professor in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell, had been working on a mini squash for about a year—but he wasn’t getting a lot of interest from seed companies. “Minis had been a really hard sell because they don’t fit a lot of people’s concepts of what a good squash should be. For a lot of vegetables, runty is bad,” Mazourek explained.
Typically plants are bred for yield rather than flavor, but that changed with the Honeynut. Mazourek had Barber cook and taste-test frontrunners, and they narrowed down contenders based on flavor first and foremost. The way Barber cooked the Honeynuts was eye-opening to Mazourek—before, he and other breeders microwaved or steamed big batches of squash at low heat in a casserole pan with water, adding moisture and diluting flavor.
In spite of all of these favorable characteristics, Mazourek had to jump through a few hurdles to get it to a wide audience. “Breeders like me have to convince a seed company to make a seed available, but they won’t do that if they don’t think growers are going to like it,” Mazourek said. “Growers won’t grow it unless they see a retailer that is going to buy it, and a retailer is not going to make room for it if they don’t think there is a customer that will buy it.
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