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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Netherland is quite famous for its ability to grow completely tasteless vegetables. After WW2, people didn't consider taste very important; only appearance, size, cost, and maybe nutritional value mattered, so lots of tasteless vegetables were bred.

Eventually customers started revolting, and now there are plenty of very tasty tomatoes available. They're more expensive, though, and not everybody can afford them. To a lot of people, cost is still a factor. And maybe even more so for export.

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You are missing the key quality for which industrial scale produce has been selectively bred over the past century: shippability. The ability to be placed in a box and moved thousands of miles without falling apart is the paramount quality of mass produced produce. Go to a farmer's market, be anything but delicate with a large heirloom tomato and you will understand what I mean.

Since growing myself, I have found a whole new appreciation for vegetables. For all these reasons the stuff you buy in the shop can never be as good (at a reasonable price anyway). It takes very little expertise to grow vegetables yourself, that are better than 90% of the stuff you can buy in the shops.

I disagree that consumers didn't find taste important, but probably was trumped by other factors. The major factor (not mentioned in your list) was a result of the industrialisation of farming and marketing (I.e. supermarkets). Vegetables had to be able to transport and store well, and maintain appearance at the end of that. So process (both breeding and other) were adapted to those goals.

If people found taste so important, tasteless vegetables wouldn't have been so successful. And it wasn't just tomatoes either; the most common potato, the bintje, and later the superbintje, are also famous for having very little taste. In my youth, this was considered normal.

During my student days in the early 1990s, I started buying organic whenever possible, and organic potatoes weren't bintjes. When fellow students came over to eat, they were stunned at the taste. "What did you do with your potatoes?" I just boiled them, nothing more. (I'm a pretty mediocre cook.) They just had no idea that potatoes could taste like that. Tasteless crap was the standard. Even when people could afford better, they didn't know it existed.

When I was kid (in the 80s, in Hungary), we ate according to the season. More vegetable in the spring, more fruits in the summer, vegetables, beans, fruits in the autumn and mostly meats and apples, (oranges, bananas - when they were on sale) in the winter.

Now you can buy everything every time, but even the meat is less tasty. Personally, I'd still rather buy food according to the season.

I don't find it to be better or worse than any other Northern European countries. And I can't find good tomatoes at any price - the more expensive on-the-vine ones smell good initially but only taste slightly better.

In that case, what do you consider to be good tomatoes? If you don't like any of them, maybe you just don't like tomatoes?

>"After WW2, people didn't consider taste very important; only appearance, size, cost, and maybe nutritional value mattered, so lots of tasteless vegetables were bred."

Do you have a citation for or more info about this? Were genetically modified tomatoes introduced after the war? I would have thought that came much later with the rise of Monsanto[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavr_Savr

Most fruits and vegetables we eat today have been genetically modified but by selective breeding sometimes over hundreds of year. Take corn for example something that is found almost all over the world its current form is because of genetic modification natural corn looks quite different.

They're not genetically modified, merely bred for specific attributes, like people have been doing for thousands of years.

Just regular evolution with human selection still works fine, with no need to directly interfere in the genetic makeup.

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