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Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor

Correlation ≠ causation.

I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest.

Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses.

This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.

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Varieties have long been selected to optimize industrial constraints, production, distribution ... Ripe often means colorful, perfumed, tasty, sweet ... and fragile.

Some tomatoes won’t ever get good. They just don’t produce the compounds necessary, have thick skin, etc.

However growing a decent variety in a vertical farming style would produce better tasting fruits.

Collecting ripe fruits with machines is however difficult.

I'm not so sure. Some biohackers have found that changing the colors in the light changes the photosynthetic reactions and thus the flavors. For instance, some colors makes the lettuce more bitter.

https://lumigrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/research-opt...

Not always true.

Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.

+1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes

OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.

Yes, it's a varietal difference. Obviously there's some personal preference here, but California grown San Marzano-style tomatoes (not true San Marzanos as that's a protected designation of origin) can be just as good. Canned tomatoes also just taste better in some applications, like pizza, so they're always going to be better than GP poster's parents' home-grown fresh tomatoes.

This is also demonstrably false in the wine industry. Soil has a direct impact on the outcome of your grapes, e.g. fields that have water runoff from mountainous/rocky areas produce wine that tastes more of minerals.

Im curious if there have been any blind studies that show this. I think a lot of what is conventional wisdom when it comes to taste in the wine industry is often not reproducible in the lab: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

Its tough to taste a $10 wine and a $100 wine blind and say "oh this one is much better than this other one". But it's easy to taste a wine and say "this is earthy" or "this is fruity" or "this is peppery". Earthier wines tend to be from grapes that are in more mineral present soil. Have you been wine tasting in a major region before? It's actually a fantastic experience. There's so much complexity in wine flavor.

Amount of sunlight also makes a difference.

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