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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.

This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what they’re actually supposed to taste like, you’ll never be able to go back to a shrink-wrapped English cucumber grown in a hot house.

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Nearly nobody under the age of 35 is aware that popcorn used to taste like corn. Not like modern ears of corn, which are bred mostly for sweetness; more like tortilla chips, whose corn is still (somehow) cultivated for corn flavor. Corny.

[edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out.

Like, all these people have had marinara sauce and even ketchup, which are made from varieties of tomatoes that are still cultivated for flavor (and thus unsuitable for long-distance shipping). They know what tomatoes actually taste like!! yet still eat these slices of pink tomato that somehow have less flavor than American cucumbers and think “this is the same thing”

i too stopped ordering tomatos for this reason

some people mentioned looking for places that advertise using heirloom tomatos, but you still have to give them a good pinch of salt

would love to join a startup that re-engineers flavor back into commercially-viable crops

Just move to Europe.

Sorry to tell you tomatoes are flavourless in Europe as well.

Yep. You have to grow own tomatoes to have good ones. Which is something only few people are willing and have option to do.

Except the available seeds are probably decreasing in quality as well.

Is there a market for good tasting tomato seeds? :D

It's actually fascinating - I remember my grandmother scooping out the seeds out of vegetables and drying them, to be used next year.

The villagers also traded them as apparently they had different varieties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee_Seeds_and_Plants

No, there are places dedicated to preserving and making available heirloom seeds.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: https://www.southernexposure.com/

Seed Savers Exchange https://www.seedsavers.org/

Open Source Seed Initiative partners with multiple seed exchanges: https://osseeds.org/

I lived almost 7 years in Germany, and the average tomato at a supermarket was lightyears beyond the US. Then farmers markets are even better.

I lived almost 7 years in the USA, and the average tomato at a supermarket was lightyears beyond Germany. Then farmers markets are even better.

I am willing to participate in a blind taste test to resolve this issue.

Funny enough, the further east you go, the better they taste.

But tbf, only for a few months when the many small farmers grow them outdoors and sell them for unbelievably cheap.

Rest of the time it's greenhouse tomatoes like everyone else.

Most tomatoes here suck as well.

Bulgaria, Greece

Just always get beefsteak tomatoes for burgers

Or Africa. Each time I've visited I've remarked on how much more flavor things have.

Frequent travels to Africa have made me incapable of swallowing pineapple and mangoes in Europe - they can't compete against fruit picked ripe.

I've actually thought about this before. AFAICT, it's mostly a supply chain issue.

In order to ship fruit long distance, they're harvested before they're ready, and artificially ripened in frozen containers. This lets them survive long journeys but kills a lot of the taste.

So your company would end up being a traceability and logistics one - what's the nearest place to your customers that grow fruit, how can you prove it, and how can you get it in their hands.

(Last two contracts were in artificial fruit ripening and supply chain traceability respectively).

I lived in a city and had a roofdeck with full sun all day. Tomatos grew amazingly well up there, and the flavor of those ripe tomatoes was so amazing that we had them with nearly every meal. It also made buying tomatos from the grocery store totally impossible.

I've noticed that full sun makes a surprisingly big difference, even with the naturally good tasting heirloom varieties (Cherokee purple, Brandywine, etc.).

I wonder what the science there is. You'd think the slower ripening in partial shade (often a week or more slower) would result in a more complex tasting tomato, but perhaps the flavor compounds never reach a critical mass.

Grape tomatoes in plastic containers are usually more flavorful because the seller doesn't have to ship them underripe to keep them from squishing.

They too are starting to taste more like cardboard.

San marzanos are pretty good … oops I shouldn’t have said that … now the words out and the geneticists are working hard to screw them up too

San Marzanos are origin-protected in Italy, so if you get Italian San Marzano's they're legally limited in ways that promote quality.

Unfortunately, there is a large black market in mis-labeled San Marzanos, so it's not a full guarantee of quality. But it's something that they're at least working on, rather than just giving up.

>> San Marzanos are origin-protected in Italy

What does that mean? Protected under what laws?

Protected under what laws?

Protected under EU law. Only tomatoes of a specific type AND from the specific region can use the name "San Marzanos".

Outside the EU I don't think there is anything stopping yoou from labling any random tomato as "San Marzano".

I may be wrong but I believe the canada-eu and eu-japan treaties also protect most denominations of origin (or rather, most by value rather than by specific items, but San Marzano should be included).

It's a regulation [0] that says that products that are associated with a specific geographic location cannot be manufactured elsewhere and then passed off as the original.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...

The EU is the main place that has these laws sorts of laws. I beleive that they will include it in trade deals so that it is enforceable in more of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_t...

It's like trademark but instead of:

"only this company can decide who can use the trademark"

It's like:

"only if it's production fulfills certain criteria can you use the name"

It's made as a consumer protection so that people can not just claim their product is this kind of "traditional" product when it isn't. Except that it's less used like a consumer protection as it's mainly used like a trademark. Controlled by a small group of people and directly profiting some regional government/economy.

Most commonly it requires the main ingredient to come from a specific region (also e.g. used for Wine or Sect).

EDIT: I kinda did throw different regulations into one explanation here.

It's a shame that Cheddar doesn't have good protection.

Real cheddar is full of flavour, slightly sour. Great stuff.

But you can go to places like the US and cheddar is not cheddar and they should not be allowed to call that cheddar.

“Farmhouse cheddar” I believe is the protected term for cheese from Cheddar or nearby.

Interesting, I was not aware of this.

you can get good cheddar in the US. Here is a widely available brand which is much better than average US cheddar https://www.tillamook.com/products/cheese/sharp-white-chedda... aged cheddar is nom nom nom

I will have to try it next time over there, but please don't be offended when I say that based upon all the cheeses I have eaten over there I won't be holding my breath.

"West Country Cheddar" is protected. I doubt you can get that in the US very easily though.

Probably because they won't understand what "West Country" means?

Cheddar in most places outside the UK is "not cheddar". If I go to the supermarket here in Sweden and buy the first "cheddar" I see prominently displayed, I'm not getting cheddar from the UK.

I agree, it's Red Leicester at best. Completely lacking in any depth or complexity of flavour.

To be clear, you can get 'real' Cheddar as well if you go to the 'fancy' cheese section of a 'fancy' supermarket and pay 3 times as much.

You know how "champagne" is technically only champagne if the grapes are from the Champagne region of France, and otherwise it's just sparkling wine? That's a legal designation in the EU.

Bourbon, too.

You know how "champagne" is technically only champagne if the grapes are from the Champagne region of France

Unless you live in Russia :)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57733684

> French producers are still allowed to use the word champagne on the front of bottles, but the use of "shampanskoye" is allowed only on local produce.

Exactly. Russian sparkling wine is called "shampanskoye", not "champagne" ;)

There are some counterfeit San Marzano out there too. Out on the west coast, I've been pretty happy with Muir Glen tomatoes.

Not to say you shouldn’t like Muir Glen, but this seems like the most appropriate place in this thread to drop this link: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/best-canned-tomatoes...

Always interested in trying new options, thanks.

I always thought tomatoes were pretty good and then I had tomatoes in Europe.

I guess that means you had them in a Mediterranean country, because elsewhere in Europe they still are rather bland in my (northern European) opinion

Yes this is the key. Most of Europe is in the same boat. Eating produce in Greece however is astoundingly better. Italy was less consistent on this but still better.

Which leads me to wonder if its really the genetic choices or is it just something about the farming, nutritional rich soils, or transportation/timing?

Sunshine is the other big variable. Most fruit will only get sweet during ripening if it's receiving enough sunlight. This is why red grapes are seldom grown in northern latitudes - their dark skin blocks sunlight and prevents them from sweetening during ripening.

Is it really about sunlight and not heat though? Otherwise one would expect to see more sweet fruit coming from northern europe than is the case. Given the near absence of "night."

France is good for tomatoes too. I think it's definitely partly about local availability. But probably also a bit to do with cultural consumer choices too. France/Italy/Greece all have big food cultures in a way that isn't quite matched by northern European countries.

That said, it seems to be getting easier to get high quality vegetables (including tomatoes) here in the UK. It's not from a supermarket and you pay more, but it is available (maybe still not quite as good as other countries, but certainly much improved on the flavourless stuff).

France has great tomatoes, but a random tomato you buy on sale at the huge supermarkets aren't any better than anywhere else (in my experience).

In France, standard supermarket tomatoes are standard bad - but we see increasing availability of different species obviously taking genes from heirloom varieties... They taste great and consumers are beginning to understand that weird shapes and colours mean flavour.

> Which leads me to wonder if its really the genetic choices or is it just something about the farming, nutritional rich soils, or transportation/timing?

- the soil plays no great role in taste but is of course the farmer most precious resource. - the plant genetics is preponderant in taste. - the consumers and farmer genetics and culture are loosely related to the plant genetics. - the missing pieces, distribution and seed providers, are the most important pieces, deciding on prices, margins and on the characteristics necessary of the products to improve those.

Local products are always best. But I can’t grow exotic fruits in Paris.

Forget about local markets. Most of the tomatoes eaten in Central Europe came from the 'sea of plastic' in the Mediterranean Spain and Morocco. Cultured from dutch seeds selected to grow really fast. Is a combination of long travel, green picked and so-so cultivars breed for market.

It's also seasonal, and depending on the provenance (local/imported).

I live in Hungary and tomatoes are crap for 10 months a year, when they're generally imported from abroad and are obviously picked up unripe.

Then during the summer you can buy tasteful tomatoes for a while, sourced locally.

In Italy they're better on average, but you can also find tasteless dutch ones in supermarkets (again, picked up unripe).

Yeah, in Italy you have to buy the local varieties. Non-PDO/PGI (protected designation of origin/protected geographical indication) cherry tomatoes are going to be tasteless (and cheaper).

You can get good ones in supermarkets in the UK, you just have to spend more and know what you’re looking for.

Recently I tried Bull’s Heart, which were stupid expensive but delicious. But you can get San Marzano in a bunch of places, and various other plum and cherry varieties with good flavours.

It’s just the average “salad tomato” that tastes like crunchy water.

Where the 'European' ones better or worse?

As a norther European, I've always found the tomatoes in the US far better than what I normally get.

Anyone can grow a pot of heirloom tomatoes outside in the summertime and end up with tomatoes that blow everything at the supermarket out of the water, if you can manage the pests. You can get pretty great produce at certain farmers markets, too.

After shelling out ~$50-$100 for intitial setup, you too can harvest $5 worth of tomatoes! And as you say, if you can keep the pests free, but that also requires for money to add to that inital purchase.

The insect/worms/catepillars in my area are more vicious than rodent invasions. If you get catepillars, they can wipe out an entire plant in a day.

> you too can harvest $5 worth of tomatoes

Your attitude is the problem - DONT equate $5 of supermarket tomatoes with an equivalent weight of home grown tomatoes.

I go out of my way to buy “expensive” tomatoes, because I don’t think of good tomatoes as being cheap produce, but more like an expensive vegetable (although price is still seasonal).

My attitude? I love gardening and growing my own vegetables. It is a simple truth, and the numbers don't lie. It gives me pleasure and enjoyment to do it. So the "entertainment" factor alone is worth it.

At the end of the day for new people trying gardening, it can be a bit disappointning. To make it all 100% magical panacea without actual realization of monetary factors, you're not being honest with potential new growers.

$50-100 is way overestimated. You can grow tomatoes in inexpensive pots. Seedlings are inexpensive.

Maybe $15 total, plus water, time, and patience. The latter two of those can be expensive, but difficult to quantify.

Tomatoes get big. They need a decent sized pot. I would recommend a 12" pot, defintely no smaller than 10".[0] Dirt aint cheap. "Cheap as dirt" wasn't formed from shopping at garden centers with bagged dirt, and you don't need a truck load for container gardening.[1] Tomoatoes need up right supports like cages, etc.[2] Seedlings are cheap individually, but each one needs a container.[3]

[0] $10 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Pennington-12-in-Terra-Cotta-Cla...

[1] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Miracle-Gro-Moisture-Control-8-q...

[2] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Glamos-Wire-Products-54-in-Plant...

[3] $4 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bonnie-Plants-19-3-oz-Early-Girl...

That's one plant, and we're at $25.

Well you're right that it doesn't scale down to single pots.

When I grew tomatoes in containers, I went for the 5-gal buckets from Lowes ($4), and bought soil in larger bags. Also your cage is more expensive than I recall paying.

On the plus side, most of those are one-time startup costs.

Our tomatoes are self-seeding at this point. We literally do nothing except pick them, and put away several dozen jars of sauce every year, from a couple neglected garden beds. It sounds like we have less trouble with pests here than you do though.

My original post said ~$50-$100 in initial setup, so you're not being fair to my original post. You need multiples of the things or similarly functioning things as posted. Yes, buying bigger bags of dirt is an option, or cheap plastic pots. If you're going to be doing this, you'll appreciate the clay pots as they don't bet brittle from UV exposure. I prefer clay as I just dislike plastic.

It's a typical reaction when suggestions that gardening can be more expensive than people realize. Yes, if you use the same pots, start taking seeds generationally, etc the price amortizes to near $0. That first year though can put a dent in a wallet. If you've been doing it for awhile, it's easy to forget.

We haven't even discussed getting into drip irrigation or similar. Each of the individual parts are cheap (tubing, sprayers/drippers, etc), but again it adds up with a timer etc.

To be abundantly clear, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone, but just giving realistic expectations. It's just like getting into Arduino and what not. The controller itself is cheap. The shields are cheap. Electronic components are cheap. Then you add up all your receipts and realize, you've spent more money than originally anticipated. It's just the nature of DIY.

Well to be fair to my unfairness to your original post, you'll also get a lot more than $5 of produce out of a single pot.

So, per pot, you'll spend $20 in the first year by my (updated) math, then $5-10 each successive year -- and you'll get about $15 of produce each season. Sometimes much more than $15. Cherry/grape tomatoes are expensive, and the plants are more fruitful than the larger varieties.

Drip irrigation is out of scope. A minute or two, per container, per day, with a hose (or watering can) while you check for hornworms is the operational expectation.

Anyway I don't disagree with your larger point. Little things definitely add up. I've been to IKEA!

I also dislike plastic, but I liked the form factor of the bucket (straight vertical sides) to pack multiples into a small space. I still have the buckets 15 years later, and I use them for all sorts of misc jobs around the garden.

Need to add a fence to your list or a large enough garden to withstand losses.

This was our first garden year. Very small plot, around 6'x6'. Deer knocked over our two tomato plants and ate every tomato off. Huge green tomatoes.

True. If it's not the deer (rural, suburban), it's the rats (urban).

Container gardening on a (south-facing) high rise balcony works pretty well, though.

You can reuse most of those things for years, you can also use common household items to improvise replacements for cages and such. We bought little plants this year for 3 bucks each, we had no expenses otherwise.

There do exist these things called "dwarf tomatoes". Also, a large pot and a few good cherry tomato seeds can blow away everything in a supermarket with little flavor bombs.

I have determinate dwarf tomato plants (3 feet tall max), which I grew from seed ($2.99), planted in old milk crates (free) lined with plastic from old bags (free) and filled from one huge bag of potting mix (~$20-30), and this gives me half a dozen plants that are superior to anything in a supermarket. I staked them with tree branches trimmed from my trees (free).

I have grown them in the actual ground many years, eliminating the cost of the potting mix, but after a few years, you need to let the soil lie fallow to avoid blights, so this year it's the milk crate planters.

I just tossed some seeds in the dirt on the side, and now I have a giant tomato plant like 3' high.. pretty cheap unless you're in an apartment I guess.

It has to be less, surely. I remember growing tomatoes in the garden as a nine year old pretty much from seeds and just in the soil.

Perhaps a regional thing.

you would probably love the dorito effect https://www.amazon.com/Dorito-Effect-Surprising-Truth-Flavor...

Its a book about the incentives and technologies that came together to result in the deflavorization of food and the rise of the "flavoring" industry as a whole.

Of the interesting things in there is one guy using a mass spectrometer to identify flavor compounds at scale to engineer a tomato that is hardy and ships well without sacrificing flavor.

I have a feeling that “love” might not be the right word, but adding it to the queue ;)

Do you happen to know what this variety is called?

I wish! in the book, the guy has created it and was giving samples to farmers. However, despite the vastly superior flavor, it wasn't quite as productive as the flavorless ones yet.

Not quite as productive for a farmer can be plenty productive for private use - he should release it!

Not just flavor. Also nutrition. You can’t make something good from just water and cotton balls.

Although we’re very good at that here in NL

A sandwich place near me does BLTs, but ONLY in the summertime when the tomatoes are worthy. I love it.

I thought I was the weirdo for thinking tomatoes on burgers didn't add any flavor. I love flavorful tomatoes everywhere else, generally, but the kind used on burgers are like mushy water.

They want the burgers to taste the same all over the place. A shame because here in south western Ontario we have amazing tomatoes. I eat at least one a day just sliced with a bit of salt.

I'm not convinced this is the case: Why would you choose lesser tomatoes for this?

I'm more inclined to think that modern "grocery store" tomatoes are generally tomatoes that ship well while still fresh. Anything else means that tomatoes on burgers would not only be seasonal, but regulated to the sorts of places tomatoes can be shipped well from the farms.

I'm not even sure how you eat a good one daily, honestly. I've always lived in places with winter, and the tomatoes tend to lose any worth (cherry tomatoes might save you though). I used to grow or buy decent ones during the summer, but moved further north and that went away.

> ship well while still fresh

I think a lot of supermarket fruit and veg is picked underripe, and then ripening is induced in a controlled environment in some warehouse a few hours before it's sent to the shops, so that it's "perfectly" ripe as it's placed on display for sale.

You're not alone. I've never liked tomato slice on burgers, always ask to remove if present. Makes the burger wet and slushy for no benefit. Partial to a slice of beetroot as a substitute.

(Hopefully you didn't establish this throwaway account to confess your controversial tomato opinions.)

> (Hopefully you didn't establish this throwaway account to confess your controversial tomato opinions.)

Their HN account is better curated than most tomato cultivars.

Try again sometime on a homemade burger with a homegrown or farmers market heirloom tomato! Divine.

Sweet corn was cultivated at least hundreds of years ago by native americans, it was never allowed to mature and be used as a grain, it makes up a minuscule fraction of corn production. Tortillas are made from varieties of corn that do fully mature “field corn”, essentially the same as the rest of corn production although there are more restrictions and preferences on which specific seed lines get into human food production.

Yah, I know the basic elementary school version of the history of corn, just trying to explain that “tastes like corn” doesn’t mean a backyard corn-on-the-cob. My impression of the latter is that they basically taste like sugar now but I guess my memory of childhood cobs is less vivid.

> I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out.

Why not just say "no, I don't like tomatoes" and save the effort? Nobody has to justify why they like or dislike the things that they do.

This is also why many AKC pure bred dogs have serious health problems. Turns of you select only on a simple metric like hair color, ear shape, of slope of the back, that you end up selecting for things that go against the very heart of what the breed was. So you lose characteristics that led to the breed in the first place.

That, and inbreeding

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/although-purebred... https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-...

With tomatoes, I thought it was more that most are not ripened on the vine, they are picked green so they ship better, then ripened artificially with ethelene gas. They turn red, but don't develop the same flavor or texture as a real ripe tomato.

Same with strawberries.

Somehow I don't seem to have the same experience as most people in this thread. Sure, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers taste quite a bit better than what I usually buy at the supermarket, but it certainly isn't perfect vs. inedible.

Possible explanations I can think of:

1. My taste perception is just broken because I am relatively young and have been raised on low-quality produce.

2. My local supermarkets just happen to stock excellent vegetables (I live in Central Europe).

3. There are some extremely high-quality breeds of tomatoes/cucumbers that I have never eaten before.

4. Other people are simply more enthusiastic about vegetable quality and therefore their claims seem exaggerated to me.

I think there are two things involved.

First is that some produce really is terrible -- "regular" cheap tomatoes can be utterly flavorless. But on the other hand, a lot of supermarkets stock tomatoes that range from fine to quite excellent, e.g. cherry tomatoes grown in greenhouses sold on the vine.

And second is that people really do exaggerate how great homegrown tomatoes are. There are tomato snobs in the same way there are coffee snobs, whiskey snobs, chocolate snobs, whatever. They insist something is 100x better, when really it's just 1.5x better, because for some reason that's important to them, part of their identity.

Yes, a farmer's-market heirloom tomato is utterly delicious. But store-bought cherry tomatoes on the vine are also super super tasty. Even the ones not on the vine can be really really good. (You can also find really bad ones though, it depends on the store.) I'd go so far as to say they're just different, neither obviously better than the other.

Where in Central Europe are you? And are you buying the cheapest tomatoes available?

The answer to these can vary results a lot.

It’s pretty much this skit https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg

Stores sell heirloom tomatoes too... sometime at twice the price though...

What's a good cucumber alternative and how do I get a hold of it?

Look for regional producers or farmers markets. I’m lucky to live in upstate NY with ready access to farm stands about 30 minutes away.

Usually smaller producers make different choices in terms of variety.

The US Northeast has so many apples that don’t travel well and have so much flavor: Spenser, Macoun, Empire... on the West Coast they’re all lacrosse balls that taste OK to decent but mainly travel well.

Everyone complains about the northeast re: weather, etc. But there’s a ton of stuff like this that many of us who live here take for granted!

I miss that aspect of New England. Agriculture there is much more local. Apple picking in the fall was a delight.

Ideally get "Japanese cucumbers" from a Japanese grocery store, or get the "Persian cucumbers" from any grocery store that has decent typography in its logo (yes there is a HUGE correlation between logo typography and cucumber quality in my experience).

https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers Bakers Creek only sells heirloom seeds (no cultivars). I get most of my garden seeds from them as they have the lineage of the seeds they sell available.

These seeds are amazing. The Beit Alpha cucumbers are fantastic and the Purple Bumble Bee cherry tomatoes are some of the greatest I’ve ever eaten.

Heirloom varieties (more properly “open pollinated”) are themselves cultivars, which just means something that was selected/bred/domesticated.

I think you’re trying to get at “hybrids” (which just means the breeding isn’t stable, i.e., the next generation isn’t first red to match the parents, but even hybrids can be quite tasty.

The issue isn’t the breeding process per se; the issue is selectively breeding for the wrong things (or a single thing instead of a mix of things).

It’s not just flavor that has been bred out. Also nutrition, and not just from tomatoes. Consumers can not visually see flavor or nutrition. They can see color, size, and uniformity of surface texture and shape. So the vegetables are bred for what can be seen and immediately considered in a buying decision.

Some of it is just size, as in the larger sized produce might have a similar amount of nutrition per unit (per tomato or per berry) but not per pound, so the nutrition is diluted with fiber and water but still there.

Though there are also a whole lot of edible plants out there that don’t hold up at all to distribution, if you aren’t picking it by hand and eating it the same day it will be ruined.

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