Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman

And it wasn’t just delicacies that suffered. Staples, too. Halyard’s grandparents had often said that fruit and vegetables didn’t taste quite as good as they used to. But if flavor had been very gradually leaking out of produce for decades, the last of it flushed away with a terrible suddenness as Halyard entered adulthood. Potatoes, carrots, beets and apples were distinguishable only by color, not by taste. Aubergines were spongy, kale was bitter, honey was as thin and tasteless as egg white. It was as if fecund Mother Earth had been replaced overnight by one of those food service companies who mostly do internment camps. There were attempts to compensate—genetic engineering, sealed biodomes, AI farmers that nurtured every sprout and youngling with the care an anxious parent gives an only child—but as was the general trend of things, even the boldest advances in technology could not keep up with the rate of collapse.