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I understand this seems mostly to be about soil depletion. I'm curious more generally if vegetables are also less nutritious because they are selectively bread for high water content and size. For example, its appeared to me for years that you vegetables you get on a Subway sandwich must have almost no nutritional content. They are all way paler than you'd normally see, and super watery.

Thinking about it, I suppose the vegetables may get that way from growing in poor soil, and Subway et al just buy those ones because they're cheaper

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Home grown tomatoes are typically much better tasting/more flavorful than the store bought ones, so I think there is probably something to this.

Although this can mostly be attributed to ripeness. Ripe tomatoes degrade extremely quickly so store bought ones are almost exclusive picked unripe and then artificially ripened at locations closer to where they are intended to be sold.

This is also why canned tomatoes are generally considered superior for making tomato soups and sauces. Tomatoes harvested with the intention to be conserved are picked much riper since they can be processed and packaged almost immediately after.

That's a good point. I was thinking about similarity between tomatoes and eggs, where a free range egg, especially where the farmer let's the chickens have the run of the farm, have much brighter and deeper colored yolks. I had understood this to relate to the chickens diet and the nutrition of the egg. So I imagined deeper brighter red tomatoes to be similarly more nutritious. It could be different mechanisms though, or maybe neither is more nutritious, they just look nicer.

It is common to add sources of yellow and orange to chicken feed, for both free range and caged chickens.

Two quotes from an internet page:

"The yolks in my certified organic birds vary in colour. Because the public expect deep yellow/orange yolks in free range eggs I supplement mine with organic vege scraps. You don't need very much to make a difference. Just toss them the odd pumpkin."

"The intensity of yolk colour may be measured against standards such as the DSM Yolk Colour Fan. Most egg marketing authorities require deep-yellow to orange-yellow yolk colours in the range 9 to 12 on the DSM Yolk Colour Fan. Yolks of more intense colour may be required for specific markets. The most important sources of carotenoids in poultry feed are maize (corn), maize gluten, alfalfa (lucerne) and grass meals; these sources contain the pigmenting carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin, which, together with other oxygen-containing carotenoids, are known by the collective name of xanthophylls."

And an article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3457452/amp/How-sec...

I actually don't make that much difference in taste between free range eggs, even home grown, and the industrial kind. The yolk is usually brighter, but not always. The real difference is usually the shell, which is much thicker and harder for free range eggs.

Home grown tomatoes on the other hand are way better tasting.

I don't know about nutrition value.

This is why, countrary to common belief, vegetables that are sold frozen are higher quality than fresh ones. My brother works in the industry and says if you can buy whole (with certain exceptions) and frozen, you have the best.

Does it need to be whole?

Does not need to, but the whole variety is usually highest quality because the producer cannot hide the defects. Think about tea or tomatoes: the more you grind it down, the more you can mix in lower quality tiers. One exception I know of is porcini mushrooms: the most expensive are whole halfs, because you can actually see there's no worms in it.

Also for mushrooms dried is really good, but obviously the texture is a little bit different when you eat it.

yes this. i used to be able to buy canned tomatoes that came out whole, nowadays it's ALL diced. I know their tricks but they won't even sell it hahah

I would actually argue no. Stuff you grow at home is never looking as good as from the store because worms, rain and so on. Strawberries or cherries that have been picked by birds, wasps or slugs are usually fully ripe. Although I agree, whole fruit make it harder to hide bad ones in there

Since I just finished making jam from it let me tell you a secret: bird netting exists. No wasps or slugs in them and mostly no worms.

In this case, sour cherries. Sour cherries are great because almost no worms (only in the variety I have that has the highest sugar content and not many either). The bird netting really helps. Last year no crop, today about 7 pints of jam and I can probably get the same again in a few weeks when the rest ripe s. This is from 3 trees that are about 4 years old now. They're the University of Saskatchewan types (Romeo, Juliet, Crimson passion etc.).

I would say at least 90% of the crop looks saleable. Of course they're sour cherries and they're much smaller than the sweet cherries everyone knows and buys at the store. Other than the bird netting these are completely hands off. No chemicals, completely organic. All they get is compost from all the leaves (the city trucks will not get mine ever!) and guinea pig poop (basically nicely processed grass/hay).

Generally the finer specimens go to the whole products.

They are entirely different strains when it comes to tomato cultivation at industrial scale. A tomato that ends up in a sauce or frozen never had the option to make it to the store while whole.

I was talking about e.g. whole tomatoes vs. crushed tomatoes vs. diced tomatoes vs. tomato sauce.

I grew up swearing off frozen vegetables as a bad thing - saw ads on TV and assumed it was something poor (?!) and time-poor people would buy. We'd grow fresh or buy whole, but almost never had frozen vegetables. Then my brother went through an intensive athletic program that had a nutritionist - that guy put him onto frozen and he passed it on to me. Fresh, there is a risk you'll let it go to crap before using it, you're paying for bits you'll trim off, etc. Frozen, it's there for months as you need it, ready to go, and was snap frozen fresh. So, odds are, there's less waste and less effort. We still grow and buy as before, but I try to have some frozen staples around, especially for quick stir-fries, fried rice for the kids, etc.

No. I harvest tomatoes for 4 years now, about 30-50 plants per year. The taste of a half-green-left-on-shelf-because-i-dont-wanna-throw-it-out fruit is better than anything you can get in a shop. You can tell just by the smell, no need to taste it. Sun and soil brings more to the table than led lamps and chemical fertilizers.

I agree but think its also the variety. I once bought semigreen tomatoes in a supermarket in December in Italy and those turned out great after some ripening at home. But they were not the standard red tomatoes you would get everywhere else but real italian flesh tomatoes. Last year my grandma had only standard red ping-pong ball tomatoes and those were almost like store bought, although grown like you described. The other grandma had old varieties and the leftovers in February were still awesome. There are also rumors that grafting while increasing yield decreases flavour, though I haven't tested that

Can that happen, or is color change the same as ripening? I thought ripening requires the fruit to be attached to the plant and exchanging nutrients/waste with the roots?

Not at all. Given my climate and growing season here for some reason I can almost never get tomatoes to properly ripe on the vine. However, if I just harvest them when they are the right size but still green or half green and let them ripen on the kitchen counter in complete darkness they will soften up, redden up and taste amazing (just add salt and pepper).

Canned tomatoes are also a different variety than what you would buy in a store fresh. Canned tomatoes are bred for a much higher amount of solids and flavor, while fresh has to worry more about color and presentation (I.e. bruising is bad).

It seems we selected for one trait and influenced another. In the case of tomatoes, we selected for uniform ripening because of the aesthetic appeal and it also caused unwittingly selecting fruit with lower sugar content[1]. I’ve also heard similar regarding selecting fruit that is hardy enough to survive transport without damage but the same genes make the fruit taste like cardboard.

[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-trouble-with-tomatoes

Supermarket breeds of vegetables are optimized for good looks and long shelf life.

Farmer market vegetables are optimized for flavor, because this is what differentiates them from the supermarket vegetables.

This makes the contrast all the more stunning.

Supermarket tomatoes also have thick/hard outsides so they don't turn to mush on the shelves.

… and also supposedly a "consistent" taste all year round – and since you don't get extraordinarily delicious tomatoes in winter, this then means mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round instead.

There was a Good Eats episode or perhaps I came across it somewhere else, but tomatoes undergo a change when refrigerated and lose flavor. Due to this tomatoes should never be refrigerated.

This always explains why store bought tomatoes taste tasteless, while home green ones have actual flavor.

Some of the products the company I work for develops are specifically for the Ag seed research industry. We develop instruments like on combine weigh systems used to measure weight, moisture and yield of various grain hybrids as they are harvested. From my limited perspective, it appears that for decades this industry has cared most (almost entirely) about breeding hybrids that increase yield in various climates. There has been very little attention paid to other constituents and characteristics of the seed. It’s only been in the last few years that our ag research customers have been interested in breeding for other characteristics. I think in large part this is because it’s not been very cost effective to collect this data (primarily through things like near-infrared spectroscopy mounted on harvesters and drones)

Which is kind of silly, because apple varieties demonstrate that people are willing to pay a premium for strains with good taste/texture.

With the exception of selling to industrial food makers, it seems perhaps that marketing—or lack thereof—is the major problem, here.

Yes, those seed companies are breeding for what the _market_ is demanding. As the market is currently constructed, for better or worse, farmers are more successful when they can sell more gain (e.g. higher yield). There is _no_ reward for quality traits on most agricultural crops except for wheat.

I’ve been learning about regenerative organic farming and those folks would make the claim that conventional fertilizer and biocide intensive farming is responsible for those bad veggies. Conventional agriculture destroys soil health and this leads to depleted crops. There’s just no nutrition left in soil that has been doused with chemicals. Places like subway buy that produce because it’s cheap.

I recall someone complaining about this at one point. Their model was this:

Most of the nutrients in the fruit come from the plant, not the ground. Since we are breeding for a higher ratio of fruit to plant size (dwarf plants, supersized fruits, sometimes both), there is less to put into the fruit.

Also fungi provide most of the nutrients to plants, and tilling slowly destroys the soil life, leaving mineral soils, in which some nutrients may not be bioavailable.

Isn't it bacteria that provides most of the nutrition a plant needs. Fungi contributes in a wide variety of ways but plants can thrive without a fungi presence.

Depends on your definition of "poor soil". It may actually be due to too good soil, the plants grow too fast and the micronutrients get diluted.

That's not what happens with actual good soil. It is what happens with high doses of nitrogen fertilizer (or NPK) on poor soil.

interestingly when I worked at Jack-in-the-box in the early 80s their produce seemed much better than what I saw at the supermarket.

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