"They’ve been bred for looks and weight, not flavor."

Yes, and cost-effective long-haul transport-ability and long shelf-life.

It's well known that tomatoes you buy in the store in the US are pure garbage, even among Americans.

I live in the Northeast. Around here practically every single person plants tomatoes if they have a backyard, even if they never plant any other vegetables ever. Chatting about how your tomatoes are doing and what type of tomatoes you are growing is a classic pasttime around these parts.

Of course the reason is there's nothing you can buy in the store that tastes like what you plant in your yard. I know quite a few people who don't like store tomatoes but like home-grown tomatoes.

To be fair, the gross tomoato issue isn't just the US. I am from Indiana, where summer tomatoes from farmer markets (or a backyard) were wonderful. Grocery store tomatoes were foamy, tasteless things.

I'm in Norway now. Same issue, only I've never found yummy summer tomatoes.

here's an exception to that rule: san marzanos are pretty cute and they're IMHO the best tasting tomato, and they look the same in Gabicce Mare or in Sacramento.

I would guess that the commenter who said that is making the statement that the US farming market touts visual quality because consumers look for visual quality and that is the reason for visual quality being a premium in the USA. Tomatoes being an example for this where recent years find the taste being almost absent but visual quality and uniformity of grocery store tomatoes being very high.

Can you show me a quality metric where American fruits or vegetables are consistently different compared to other countries? These are commodities, after all, so there is little differentiation. Is it visually, callorically, or nutritionally different somehow? I immediate went to visually, because one does notice this in the US compared to Latin America.

Everyone is jumping on me about tomatoes, but Europe has the same bland greenhouse tomatoes in my experience.