Blueberries that taste the same but are transparent in the middle. Tomatoes that tase water. Cucumber that look great and almost tasteless. You don't know what you are missing if you have never tasted the "real" deal.
Here in the UK (though I'm sure this applies globally), tomatoes sold in supermarkets taste like plastic. Reason being is that they are picked when they are green and they "ripen" by the time they get to the store shelf.
This is done because tomatoes are almost impossible to transfer safely in large quantities, because when they are ripe they are softer, bruise easily and they tend to go bad quickly.
So, grow your own tomatoes - it's surpisingly easy - and the taste is amazing.
I think they're picked right when they start to ripen then finish in the box/transit.
Big initial cost, but those tomatoes taste so sweet. It's also just a fun hobby, I don't intend to save money on it
The vast majority comes from wholesale auctions just like everything else.
Of course, "around here" is in a rural area, surrounded by...farms.
The issue I have with most store-bought produce is that it has practically no taste whatsoever. It tastes like water. Tomatoes taste like water. Peppers taste like water. I've never had store-bought berries (of any kind) taste anything.
I've noticed that when you pick an unripe tomato, or cherry, or grape, or whatever, they actually have a taste. Not a very good taste, I wouldn't like eating unripe cherries.
However, the same things from a supermarket have practically no taste. I've never had produce picked from my mother or grandparents' garden taste like water. If they're unripe, they'll taste bitter, sour, something. They will absolutely have some kind of actual taste.
Similar with strawberries, I was asking what sort they had but don't remember any more. He told us he selects them for taste, not optimizing for scale. But the plants are slightly harder to take care of and sometimes the harvest fails. But the taste is worth all the hazzle.
What you can see a lot on current market are "heirloom" varietals made by entrepreneurs that take industrial variatel, cross them to create new completely new varietals. But just because something doesn't look like modern tomato it doesn't mean it taste good.
You can still find old varietals in seed banks and around seed savers, but hip breeders are much more noisy in the market. I am not saying those new breeds are worthless, but they are kinda hit and miss and I would not consider them heirloom.
I think the reason is that those tomatoes never saw anything resembling soil or sunlight; they are grown in some fertilized solution inside a greenhouse and propelled to a rapid growth.
Here in Norway you can get quite tasty tomatoes sold in supermarkets. Here's[1] a "blog" article from one of them. There are other brands and tomato variants.
Of course they cost slightly more than the ones we import from wherever but the taste more than make up for it.
That said, I've never tasted a "real" tomato so not sure how close they come.
[1]: https://coop.no/mega/kjokkenhagen/verdens-soteste-tomater-dy...
Is that really true any more? The supply chains are incredibly fast now and I can't imagine there's enough time for this process to take place - even tomatoes from southern Spain are probably on shelves in a few days. It's not like shipping bananas from the Caribbean. I think it's more that the watery tomatoes are the varieties that grow the fastest and offer the best margins at the lower pricepoints.
An increasing number of tomato imports are coming from the mega greenhouses where they are harvested red and can be packed on site. This one is Dutch [1], but I remember hearing that they're building some in the UK. Clearly they're never going to be the same as growing them in a garden in Sicily and leaving them to ripen for a few days in the sun, but not bad for mass production, available year round and much, much better than the tomatoes in the supermarkets a couple of decades ago.
> So, grow your own tomatoes - it's surpisingly easy - and the taste is amazing.
I've been trying for a few years. It's been fun and the varieties are way more interesting, but I'm not in danger of flooding the market.
I'd imagine you can do the same with tomatoes?
(As an aside, some fruits including apples also produce ethylene a they ripen. This is why putting an apple and an avocado in a plastic bag will cause the avocado to ripen faster. It is also the origin of the saying "one bad apple spoils the whole basket", because bad apples produce a lot of ethylene and causes the rest of the basket to quickly overripe. More info can be found at https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00016 for example).
It is, even within relatively close main EU nations we had significant losses (~30% of gross weight) between organic/Biodynaimc suppliers from Italy to Germany where I did my first year of apprenticeship. My first job was to sort through the waste pumpkins and potatoes that arrived on a daily basis for 2 weeks in September in large crates for storage and distribution to the farm's stores/CSA/Farmers Market outlets.
It's funny because that farms soil was so rich that the seeds scattered around from wasted pumpkins in the compost pile were vining well into December. I found a few decent sized pumpkins (albeit green) when we had to turn the compost pile later in the Winter.
But suffice it to say, it's insane how much food gets lost due to transport!
> An increasing number of tomato imports are coming from the mega greenhouses where they are harvested red and can be packed on site.
Perhaps to hyper-local Markets that's the case, but having spent time in Supply Chain for large Auto-manufactures batch shipping is still the norm for such low-margin commodities and delays have only compounded further since COVID. Also, Holland is (or until recently as COVID may have changed that) the largest exporter of it's Green-house produce and biggest importer of Organic and Biodynamic produce in the EU. In short, for many in NL: they're not consuming their own supply.
> I've been trying for a few years. It's been fun and the varieties are way more interesting, but I'm not in danger of flooding the market.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't had a proper tomato this year, and this is coming from a former farmer and chef.
... Not as good as a warm tomato straigh off the plant on a sunny day, but not far off.
Similarly, canned tomatoes taste great[1] because they are picked ripe and packaged.
[1] Canned tomatoes have a slight cooked taste so they're never going to taste fresh, but are great in anything you're going to cook.
Turns out these taste very close to fresh natural tomatoes.
Source: I grew up picking tomatoes from my grandmother’s garden and eating them like apples.
Your problem is on word 4 - tomatoes do not grow well in the UK.
Places were tomatoes grow well locally do have good tomatoes (in season). I can confirm this personally for Switzerland, California, Bulgaria.
I don't know what it is... mass production? Tomatoes bought in the city do not even taste good in season (like now). We now have bigger and tasteless fruits. Why? I want to enjoy eating, I don't care if it's 25% smaller. Now they try to fool us with more colourful pulp or exterior... but taste the same.
I guess it takes more time to grow them if we want them to have taste. Orchards in my grandfather's town are not even irrigated (or much less, because it's dry weather) and they taste amazing.
This only helps hyperpalatable and unhealthy foods to gain strength between young people.
I'm pretty sure that 99% clients would choose the one which is 25% cheaper. Especially if those products are used in (not only) fast food bars, canteens at schools etc.
It is the structural incentives of the modern food retailing industry [1]. Buyers (in aggregate, both corporate and end-buyers) do not care about taste as a primary purchasing decision point. It comes in around 4-6th in importance. Your and my preferences are seen as a rounding error of the market segments. Be really, really wealthy enough to source from your own farms and ranches next to where you live, or have lots of disposable time to raise your own food, or (like many here I suspect) pick your battles and cobble together a solution between a little raise your own, a little CSA, a little pick your own, a little farmer's markets, a little from co-ops, etc., which again, exacts a price of your disposable time, a luxury working poor do not possess.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/07/9313480...
Especially for kids. In summer, my kids ask for a cold cucumber instead of a can of soda. I guess if the cucumber was too tasty they wouldn't really like it as much. It's "chewy water", just like watermelon but without the sweet.
For example tomatoes (it's covered in a few books on the subject) have lost a large part of their sugar content after the 80s due to mass market techniques and genes that yield more and less quickly riping ones, but of lower taste.
And yes, if you go to extremes like rotten meat, there is of course little dispute. However, many cultures have developed certain dishes that they consider delicacies while outsiders would find them revolting.
But even from everyday experience, I'm sure even you will reassess your position if you think about it a bit more. Have you never had the experience that some food that you absolutely love and need others to try gets you little more than a shoulder shrug from someone else?
Taste even changes over time which is another intuitive reason why your claim makes little sense. Do you remember the first time you've tried coffee or beer (if you drink those)? Most people are not too fond of these flavors at first, yet they drinks are among the most consumed beverages, at least in Western societies.
And in the end, you gotta eat something. I suppose instead of not eating anything healthy at all, the more prominent strategy seems to have been to accompany healthy produce with super-unhealthy condiments (basically, loads of sugar, salt, and fat) to make it tasty again. That's probably the more worrying consequence, though.
Of course, honey is questionable - just because it's a more-or-less natural product doesn't make it especially good for you.
Sugar, though, yeah. Sugar is the devil.
And seems almost impossible to avoid unless you cook everything from scratch and don't snack on anything premade.. it's so crazy.
These are simply different species: The European blueberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) has dark meat, the North American blueberry (Vaccinium cyanococcus) has whiteish meat.
The farmed blueberries one can buy in a shop here in North Europe are large, and really very different from the blueberries/bilberries one can pick in the nature. Over here (Finland), both are available in shops; the "bilberry" (V. myrtillus) is bought for distribution from people who gather it from forests (often Asian or East European guest workers and even sometimes even retirees who do it for fun and additional income) while V. cyanococcus (V. corymbosum) is imported from commercial farms in Central and Southern Europe, and I suppose is mechanically harvested.
However I have noticed from when visiting small towns in Italy that tomatoes taste way better there than in Norway. Ours don’t have the explosion of taste I felt in Italy. I had no idea a chibatti with just tomato and mozzarella could taste that amazing.
I know two greenhouse growers, growing the same variety of tomato on the same rootstock in the same medium. One of them has ~5-5.5% DMC while the other has close to 8% in the mid-spring season.
They taste different, but they yield different as well (higher quality means lower yields).