Chewing gum has stronger flavor, our snacks have more potent seasoning and it is common to see ethnic foods containing curry or Asian spices on restaurant menus across the U.S. Clearly, the American palate is expanding and we’re craving flavors that are bold and exotic.

“Umami” is the word some in the food industry use for the new phenomenon; it is Japanese for “good flavor.” It describes the “pleasant savory flavor found in protein-heavy foods,” noted Miriam Gottfried in the The Wall Street Journal. It is being viewed more and more as the fifth basic taste after sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It is described as “an explosion of flavor” by some in the food industry.

Food companies are trying to keep up with the ever-growing interest in the new and dramatic and need for “umami.” For example, according to Gottfried, Frito-Lay’s new line of Doritos cranks up the heat with chip flavors labeled First-, Second- and Third-Degree Burn, courtesy of Asian-inspired spices.

The shift from bland to bold correlates to the growth in U.S. restaurants over the last 30 years.

John Cywinski, chief marketing officer for Applebee’s International Inc. told James Peters of Nation’s Restaurant News that the sheer number of restaurants guests are exposed to has contributed to the development of more sophisticated palates over time.

The baby boomer generation also has been a driving force in the trend. Peters recently reported that Gerald Hornbeck, president of Concept Management, a Nashville, Tenn., restaurant-consulting firm, has found that boomers have experienced greater exposure to foreign foods as a result of increased world travel compared to older generations.

In addition, the growing ethnic makeup of the American population leads to bolder flavors in casual-dining restaurants. “The globalization of the American palate” is how Hornbeck described it.

No matter what the cause, Americans have come to love worldly cuisine and flavors that give their taste buds a rush of adrenaline.

A pineberry is a white strawberry with red seeds that tastes a lot like a pineapple. One trait pineberries deliver in ample quantities is the “wow” factor. And because of that “wow” factor, pineberries may soon be on restaurant menus and sold at grocery stores and farmers’ markets across the country.

A handful of restaurants and farmers’ markets offer pineberries now, but the unique fruit is not yet readily available in the United States. The grocer Waitrose in the United Kingdom did offer the distinctive strawberry to customers in 45 stores in April. In the U.S., The Strawberry Store, an e-commerce site based in Middletown, Del., plans to offer pineberry plants to customers this year.

“I’m propagating them and probably sometime in mid to late August, I plan to add them to my shopping cart for sale,” said Mike Wellik, owner of The Strawberry Store.

Right now, Wellik is targeting his sales to the retail market because he doesn’t have enough plants to meet wholesale demand. As people become more aware of pineberries, Wellik believes they will catch on as a popular specialty fruit.

“There’s kind of a reluctance of some people to try something new because they have been conditioned for years to see red strawberries and taste only red strawberries,” Wellik said. “I’m finding with some of the chefs and with some of my customers that they’re more willing to experiment than they have in the past and they are passing that on to their customers.”

Wellik said the pineberry trend is still new “and we are at the very beginning.” But he does see the day when grocers and farmers’ markets will offer pineberries as a unique specialty fruit.

Wellik works with a chef in Pennsylvania who grows his own pineberries in his restaurant garden and offers the fruit as a unique topping on cupcakes and other pastries. At first glance, some customers think they’re being offered an unripe strawberry and don’t want it, but the chef convinces them it is ripe, and once they try it, they like it.

Because chefs and others are looking more and more for the “wow” factor in food, Wellik believes pineberries will soon catch on, much like other specialty fruits (kiwi, star fruit and passion fruit) that are now readily available to consumers.

“Many chefs are experimenting and passing on what they discover to their customers, introducing them to new tastes, new flavors, new colors and all sorts of different things,” Wellik said.

“I think that ‘wow’ factor is something that people are going to remember, and they’re going to go out on the Internet and look for those white strawberries,” Wellik said. “When you bite into it, the inside of the fruit is very white and it kind of looks a little bit like sugar, and they are very sweet, so they are attractive on multiple levels.”

By Amy Evans Streeter, Oral Historian, Southern Foodways Alliance

Oystermen along the Florida panhandle talk about the wind-driven bay, a process by which changing winds affect the growth and character of the oysters that thrive in the brackish waters of the Apalachicola Bay. Winds coming from the east bring with them fresh water from the Apalachicola River, resulting in a fresher, fatter oyster. Winds traveling from the west carry salt from the Gulf of Mexico, making a smaller, saltier oyster.

“You can tell the difference in the oyster on the east wind and the west wind, as far as the meat content and the shell,” is how Tommy Ward, owner of 13 Mile Oyster Company in Apalachicola puts it.

But no one wants to talk about what will happen when that westerly wind brings oil.

The oyster industry in this part of the country has been struggling for a while. Tighter regulations, high gas prices, overharvesting and persistent Bay closures due to red tide (a toxic algal bloom) have kept some oyster skiffs dry-docked and run a few people out of the business entirely. And in 2005, Hurricane Dennis dealt the local industry a crushing blow, decimating many of the processing houses in Franklin County. But red tide comes and goes, and oyster houses can be rebuilt. The recent Gulf Oil spill is making people wonder, what if there are no more oysters?

As of July, the Apalachicola Bay was still open for harvesting and the oysters that came out of it were safe. But since the oil spill, Tommy Ward’s production is down 80 percent.

“Everybody’s gone BP-ing,” he said recently. “You don’t have the workforce to harvest the product.” The dollar signs are just too big for fishermen to ignore. Right now, the best money to be made out on the water is working for BP. So, even in a place where the oysters are still safe, there are fewer and fewer people left to harvest them. And the fate of the oysters themselves is unknown.

The Southern Foodways Alliance first visited Tommy Ward in 2005 as part of its Florida’s Forgotten Coast oral history project, an effort to document the seafood industry in and around Apalachicola. We called on him again, when we wanted to try and put a finger on the pulse of his community in the wake of the BP oil spill.

Today, the Southern Foodways Alliance’s archive consists of 500 interviews with people like Tommy: oystermen and bartenders, pitmasters and soul food cooks—profiles of everyday people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting and honoring a particular culinary craft. Each oral history interview is, of course, a profile of a person, but it is also a time capsule—an account of the way things were at a certain time and in a certain place. A portrait of oyster harvesting in the Apalachicola Bay before there were no oysters. A reminder that stories like Tommy’s are worth collecting.

When the wind wafting across the Apalachicola Bay comes from the east, old-timers looking to eat a saltier oyster will anchor milk crates or croaker sacks filled with bivalves in the shallow waters of the Gulf overnight to let the oysters soak up more salt water.

Here’s hoping the wind never does bring that oil.

The Southern Foodways Alliance is a non-profit organization based in Oxford, Miss., that documents, studies and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Visit www.southernfoodways.org for more information.