Hacker News Reader

Comment by nck4222 | Hacker News Reader

Organic doesn't mean more flavor.

Tasteless strawberries are around for a few reasons

1) you can't try before you buy. bigger, redder strawberries look better, so sell better, so are grown more, and so on until that's the expectation. if varieties are cultivated for their looks, that means they're not cultivated for their taste or sugar content

2) bigger strawberries are easier/faster to pick, which means they're cheaper to pick

3) people want strawberries in winter, which means for a lot of us that means we're accustomed to buying strawberries that have been shipped thousands of miles and not picked recently.

https://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/152944880/bigger-means-better...

View on HN

> Organic doesn't mean more flavor.

It doesn't formally mean that, but often it means that in practice.

I think some of the success of organic food is that it can in practice be a marker for attractive features that otherwise have nothing to do with "organic". Consumers learn the association and use it, even if they don't buy into the organic philosophy.

There are much better labels than "organic" to indicate flavor. "Heirloom", "local", "in-season", "small plot", "not greenhouse grown", "small", "picked ripe", "picked today" are all labels that are more likely to indicate flavor than organic, IMO.

But the best is to find a producer or label that prioritizes flavor.

Organic produce has monopolized the premium section of supermarkets. Without organic, supermarkets would find some other way to sell higher margin produce to less price conscious consumers. That dimension would probably be taste (or locality, which I have another rant about).

Maybe they should try advertising this.

For me, "organic" is a marker for "bullshit label that's used to convince people to pay more." If they actually do taste better, I might buy the stuff.

Most supermarkets have pint baskets where you’re allowed to sample. Sometimes they have sampling and “pit” trays. So people do have a choice at least in some supermarkets.

The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.

Seascapes and Rosas have a decent combo of shelflife and taste.

I want my strawberries to survive till nightfall. Because strawberries.. yum!

Why is a long lasting bad thing better than a short lasting good thing? Why not buy frozen berries, dehydrated berries, or just cardboard, if shelf life is the priority?

>The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.

Are you married and if so, do both of you work full time jobs? My hunch is that this is directly related to two-income households

Shelflife has always been a big hurdle to cooking for me, and I’m a bachelor.

In a similar boat, and I find that meat and veggies I buy from the CSA have longer fridge life because they were butchered/picked closer to selling time

I suppose there are certain tricks to it, but one of the big things I do to make this much less of a problem is to make meals using only one or two at most short-life items.

The rest of the meal comes from things that will happily sit for weeks on end in the cupboard without going off. Things like: Pasta, onions, tomato pureé, garlic, stock cubes, kidney beans, lentils, rice, bacon, etc.

This does mean that often the one fresh thing I use is the meat in any given dish.

This is analogous to how people used to cook as well, keeping a large store of long-life ingredients and merely supplimenting them with whatever was fresh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com