I hope robots lead to smaller, tasty strawberries (i.e. the normal ones).
The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.
The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.
Strawberries are extremely, extremely perishable.
Ones that can be grown year-round in California and survive shipping to New York need to be larger and harder to not turn to mush, there's just no other option.
But here in New York, in June and part of July (only) you can of course buy delicious local strawberries that are everything a strawberry should be. Usually at orchards or farmers' markets -- local supermarkets usually don't carry them, I'm not sure if it's because of logistics (they really need to be sold same-day or next-day in the worst case) or because farmers don't want/need to give a cut to a middleman, or both.
So I don't think robot picking will change any of that.
2) Off season reasons. There is a race to put the first strawberries in the market. They are sold for more money (because is a luxury and people want to celebrate the end of a harsh winter), but lack taste. Is the prize to pay for wanting to eat strawberries at the "wrong time" and in some sense is not an unfair prize. Many early or extra-late fruits are not so good as the in season cultivars, but when they mature there is nothing more, so is also fine to have it.
You can just wait for the spring and taste more flavoured fruits.
Same thing with people saying the Dutch tomatoes they find in their supermarket are watery. No, it's because your supermarket has found that they can make more by selling the bigger (and cheaper) tomatoes. They could easily buy the more tasty varieties if they wanted to.
You must be getting them from the wrong place, because the ones in California are delicious. You can often find them on the sides of highways in farm country. Spectacular.
Eventually some europeans stumbled upon american strawberries: Bigger, less fragile, less sweet, less tasty. They hybridised the two kinds and got today's garden strawberries.
Not sure if it's even close to what really happened, but thought I'd share :) as I found it interesting when I was told about "fregoline di bosco"
> The garden strawberry was first bred in Brittany, France, in the 1750s via a cross of Fragaria virginiana from eastern North America and Fragaria chiloensis, which was brought from Chile.
And like everything else, the more modern varieties are bigger & easier to farm, at the expense of taste.
They are incredibly tasty but I've never seen them in a shop, you just pick them on your own.
Intensive agriculture is definitely used for strawberries in europe too, and it constitutes the vast majority of the market.
They can generally (when in season, and fresh) be as tasty as what my father grew.
Or switch to boutique products (food, furniture, whatever) that costs 10X - 100X more than the commodity stuff.
They use enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently kills the taste of everything underneath.
They use toasters, because American bread tastes like it was made of sawdust mixed with gum, and toasting it makes it taste slightly better.
They grill a lot of things for the same reason.
They eat a lot of eggs, because it is almost impossible to cook them wrong :)
And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by. I've actually been to a Walmart which, despite being huge (200k sqft) have not sold any fresh vegetables at all.
I’ve had plenty of bad food in France and Italy by the way, you can get bad stuff anywhere.
Judging a nations cuisine by personal anecdotes is not very rational.
And Walmart is not really a grocery produce store. If you want fresh vegetables, go to your local grocer, farmers market, or atleast a Whole Foods. I mean if you’re going to Walmart to buy vegetables, perhaps your buying “American cuisine” at the wrong places too. Anyplace slathering ketchup on stuff is fast food or fast casual, or a really shitty restaurant.
I'm not sure how you're supposed to judge a nation's cuisine by anything but personal anecdotes, unless you have some metric for noticing American tomatoes taste like paste, and Italian ones don't.
This whole discussion reminds me of the Conan O’Brien running skit where his “Producer”, an over the top Europhile, is constantly commenting on how everything is better.
But for $15 / €12, you can buy excellent wines in France. In the US at that price range, it is extremely rare to find good wines. Just like strawberries, it's about the appearance (the bottle, the label, the name) and not the flavor.
Literally the only people I have ever met who think SF or California in general have food worth barking about are people who live there and don't get out much. For America even a small place like Portland Maine is vastly more interesting, better quality ingredients and better in general.
Maine more interesting? Maine is mostly white. California is far far more racially diverse and the cuisine is a result of a large number of immigrants and cultures mixing. I doubt you’ll get any comparable Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, or oodles of other ethnic cuisines there, nor the countless fusions that have been produced. From a variety standpoint there’s no way Maine compares.
SF has the most restaurants per capita of any city in the US.
Your comments basically sound like snobbery to me, and unjustified by anything other than personal opinion and anecdote.
Lol, yes, because white people don't know how to cook anything. Great argument. I guess you've never been to Maine.
>SF has the most restaurants per capita of any city in the US.
Obviously having the most of something means they're the best!
I agree: I am a snob -I think SF is bloody awful and people who say "the food" is something to crow about rarely notice the rivers of human sewage flowing by their restaurants, or the fact that the tomatoes taste like paste.
A typical Albertsons, Safeway, or Ralph’s is more the size of France’s big box stores, and those do have fresh produce.
As for the food sections in a typical grocery store in the US (Kroger, Publix, Albertsons, Safeway), it is laughably tiny and the quality is depressing.
For example, Carrefour vs Walmart
This results in inflated prices and inconsistent quality, with an emphasis on over-salting, sugaring, buttering things (as the lowest-common-denominator market demands).
But I've got to agree that my experience in New York was pretty similar. Even in a fine dinning steak house, the steak was hidden by a 'salt crust' which made it practically impossible for me to enjoy it. In an Italian the tomato sauces were so sweet they reminded me of the sauce you'd have with baked beans. Everything was just over done in one way or another.
On the other hand, most -if not all- of tomato sauces in the UK are so acidic that Spaniards living in the UK are importing tomato sauce from Spain (as it has a bit of added sugar). It might be similar with actual Italians, so maybe this example is just that you're used to your way of having tomato sauce :)
Everything in America appeared to be shifted towards an extreme though. Fattier, bigger, saltier or sweeter than you'd find in much of Europe.
It's usually cut down with things like chalk and aspirin when sold to final customers across Europe.
Oh, you meant the other Coke. Nevermind :D
I don't know what restaurant you were at, but this sounds quite unusual for "fine dining steak house"s in New York.
The produce section at Walmart is actually larger than my local so called grocery stores (Kroger, Publix...)... Where carts are full of cereal and other non perishable food.
On the topic of strawberries, they would be half the price at the ethnic super markets.
I somewhat disagree with the statement grilling takes the taste and hides the freshness. I would say that to frying. If you go to your local "seafood" restaurant most of the menu is fried this, fried that.
Nearly everything you said is incorrect, this one in particular. Vegetables are not expensive in the US compared to other nations of similar incomes.
The US is a leading producer of vegetables such as cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, squash, potatoes (/tuber), onions, turnips, soybeans, carrots, pumpkins and tomatoes (/fruit). Globally the US is third in vegetable production, behind China and India. For one example, the US produces about 15% of all lettuce globally (with 4% of the world population). Vegetables are more than plentiful in the US, we unfortunately waste enormous amounts of vegetables.
The US consumes more vegetables per capita than these European nations:
Germany, UK, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia, Austria, Ireland, Iceland, Hungary, Czech, Bulgaria
US vegetable consumption is almost identical to the average of the EU. It's also essentially identical to the consumption in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Interesting fact: the poorest countries in Europe typically consume 50% to 100% more vegetables per capita than the wealthiest countries in Europe.
Source: FAOStat
This is indeed interesting, but I guess vegs are mostly grown on poorer countries (except Netherlands I suppose), so it's cheap and easy to buy local vegs. Also, mediterranean/southern european countries (Italy, Spain, Greece - poorer than their northern neighbours) have different diets than northern countries. Less meat and more tomato/olives/uncooked stuff as the climate doesn't require to ingest as many calories as in the north.
Are you kidding me? Find a farmer's market.
And having eaten European food, I would say the quality of most of it is trash. The French drown their dishes in butter because that's the only thing that makes their food palatable. British, Irish, and Scottish food simply isn't unless you're drunk, which explains their proclivity for drinking at every meal. And Italian food? It's best ingredient comes from America...
But then your post is full or weird stuff - organic local food being "especially cheap" doesn't make much sense, when everywhere this is the most expensive category due to extra costs on whole process of growing/treatment/transport
The ingredients were about on par with organic vegetables available at my local grocery store. (I live in a nice part of California, so we have better access to fresh organic heritage vegetables than almost anywhere else in the world--including Europe.)
While the food certainly looked much fancier than what I normally in in America, and the cooking was far better executed than most American restaurants, on a flavor basis it was merely average. Quite simply, I've had more flavorful food at a taco stand.
You can also try to compare it to indian cuisine for example, which is fabulous for many people (including me) and reasons, but an attempt to compare those is an indication that you don't really have a clue about whole haute-cuisine experience. And lets not forget you considered some of British cuisine as something to compared to, which is... a bit clueless, isn't it.
But its good that you enjoy tacos, that's clearly more your type of experience.
Watermelons used to be quite large, and packed with large, dark seeds. From these, I learned what watermelons taste like. At some point, I think in the late 1980s or early 1990s, growers started selling seedless watermelons in increasing numbers. We never bought these, because they were generally inferior in taste and texture. But they were easy to cut up, and to put into a fruit salad without getting any watermelon seeds in it. As time went on, the seeded shelf space decreased, and seedless increased. Then they started getting smaller in the 2000s.
Now, you cannot find a full-sized, genuinely watermelon-flavored watermelon in the supermarket. They are all these tiny, muskmelon-sized seedless orbs, with pale pink flesh that is vaguely reminiscent of a watermelon--like a sweeter, pinker cucumber. And these disappointing little 5# sterile triploid things cost the same as a full-blown 20# "real" watermelon.
The small strawberries are still available--sometimes. It is readily apparent that growers are still experimenting with different cultivars. I really only want two things from strawberries. I want them to taste like strawberry, and I want them to not be covered with mold the day after I buy them. The big ones seem to last longer, but the small ones generally taste better. So I don't see a clear winner there yet. If I had the choice, I'd probably buy the smaller ones and save the longer-lasting species for table fruit later in the week. But this puts the strawberry in direct competition with other fruits that tend to go moldy faster. The produce manager probably wants fruit that can stay on display long enough to get sold rather than go moldy before someone can pay for them. So my preference doesn't matter.
It isn't really that "people" prefer to buy them, but that supermarket produce managers prefer to sell them. People generally don't get two different varieties to choose from. If they want "strawberries", they buy what the store stocked, or they don't. And the store wants to stock fruits that bruise less easily, grow redder, hold more water, and rot more slowly. Just like with the tomatoes.
The "pick your own" places could cater to consumer preferences, but those will be shaped by what has been available to them previously. The "self pick" farms are only open during the local growing season, while the grocery stores are importing the varieties they prefer all year. The stores train them to seek out firm, shiny red, gigantic strawberries.
I guess I should count myself lucky that I can still get full size seeded and full size seedless watermelons, with essentially no difference in flavor (seeded are indeed a little sweeter, but not by much). Also, they are quite red, dark red if ripe-on-the-edge-of-spoiling, but decent red with still about a week or so of shelf life.