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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Not even focusing on macronutrients. We’re just focussing in mass.

I’m not looking forward to the end of tomato season and the inevitable disappointment when I buy them from the grocery store.

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The worst is strawberries. The huge strawberries you can buy in the store have the same flavor content as the tiny ones you can grow in your yard, but it's completely diluted with water. They're disgusting.

Where I live, I can buy tiny fruits and vegetables from local farmers, or I can buy imported ones that are 3x as large and get twice as much for half the price.

The difference in fruit flavor is unbelievable. Tiny strawberries grown on a couple acres of land versus mega farm strawberries aren’t even in the same flavor category. The tiny ones taste almost identical to strawberry candies, but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water.

> but large ones that draw people in with the wow factor are like firm lumps of sour water.

Sounds like they were grown hydroponically. I can't stand hydroponically grown tomatoes for the same reason. Just bags of water.

sreet protesters like them.

Same thing with carrots. Or tomatoes. It's amazing how vegetables can taste good when they haven't been bred into giant lumps of blandness.

Is it just because they are giant? I’ve had relatively big strawberries that are sweet and flavorful in China. But in the US, they taste like cucumber plus citrus, no sweetness, no aroma, just incredibly sour and watery.

I don't know what Chinese strawberries are like, but I always figured that American strawberries are watery and sour because they're not only big, but they're also grown too quickly for flavor to develop. I think they're engineered to artificially mature early and are basically still unripe.

I have had amazing and bland Strawberries from Safeway in the US. Not sure how to pick the good ones. Time of year?

Yes, local in season fruit is always tastier. I suspect because out of season fruit has to come from further away, meaning it has to be picked before it normally would be if it didn’t have to travel so far.

I too have had this experience. Now I always sample one from a pack before I buy. I used to feel guilty doing that, but the quality varies so much and I got sick of wasting fruit purchases when they turn out to be sour or gross. Same with grapes and blueberries from Costco.

It's really weird to me that people are generalizing this by nationality. Sure, a lot of supermarket strawberries are terrible. They also frequently (but not always) come from outside the US. Some are ok, and some people get flavorful ones somehow, because I've had excellent quality ones with dessert in a restaurant. Also, there are farmer's markets and stands, even though I'm not in the habit of going to them.

I noticed the striking difference between strawberries grown in Thailand (yes, it's true, during the cool season in the mountainous regions) which are small, non-uniform in shape and intensely flavored, compared to the huge, beautiful and watery tasteless hothouse grown strawberries imported from Korea.

To be fair to the cucumber, actual homegrown ones do have a taste.

There were people arguing how great increased crop yield was in the last few weeks. [0] Some comments were made about how the exponential factor of crop yields outweighed the loss of output nutrients. Glad to see the counterargument on the table.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20667031

Tomatoes can particuralry well so for the out of season times I've come to preffer using canned and avoiding the unripe tomatoes, which are often ripened (turned red) by truckloads using nitrogen. America's Test Kitchen has lot's of reviews on canned tomatoes[0].

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/231-canned-w...

Store-bought tomatoes are just a pale reminder of what a real tomato tastes like. It's no wonder that people who never ate a ripe tomato fresh from the garden don't like tomatoes; there is nothing good about them but the memory of something incomparably better.

Maybe my gardens faulty, but within the same variety, superstore and my-personal-garden tomatoes are near indistinguishable.

The only difference I see is my garden tomatoes seem to have a thin layer of city dirt on the skin that's hard to wipe off... (That black dusting of tyre rubber and brake dust that makes a tissue dirty if you wipe it over the surface)

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