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My 93-year-old mother, who loves to cook, often says, “Nothing I make tastes like what my mother used to make.” She complains, “Today tomatoes are unblemished and red, but they have no flavor. Nothing tastes like it used to when it was home grown the old-fashioned way without fancy fertilizers and chemicals.”

I agree with her but didn’t realize how much our ingredients had changed in flavor until I visited Albania. The Albanian government’s isolationist policy kept it a rural country where little had changed in 50 years. However, in 2009 when I visited Albania, with a democratic...