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Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

Right now I have a huge selection of Alphonsos lying on a bed of hay as it is being naturally ripened along with Malgova mangoes. I will be getting Imam Pasand in a couple of days. For those in the know, Imam Pasand is considered even better than Alphonsos - especially those sourced from a specific part of Tamil Nadu in India.

NOTE: I work with natural and organic farmers in India to try and find a market for their produce.

Believe me when I say this - naturally ripened mangoes are on a different level altogether when it comes to taste. What you get overseas is usually not naturally ripened as the amount of wastage is usually quite high with naturally ripened mangoes.

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This. It’s like people in the west have never eaten real mangoes and only know of it via artificial flavour.

I’ll also mention Raspuri which is my favourite kind. As the name suggests it’s very juicy

Isn't this also down to different types of Mango being grown in Brazil than in India?

The small yellow Indian mangoes that are exported also taste very different from the exported big green-red Brazilian mangoes.

So the export might have to do with it, but I think it's the type of mango that makes the difference.

I find Indian mangoes much better personally, even if exported, although when traveling in India they were even better.

Most people in the west haven’t eaten real mangoes. The US and Europe are just too far away to get access to proper tropical fruit because it spoils so fast. We get the varieties that travel well which are almost universally the worst tasting (fewer sugars for bacteria to eat and more fiber and cellulose filler). So ironically, yeah, synthetic flavors are sometimes the only place we get certain flavors - like the artificial banana flavor that’s based on the Gros Michel that preceded the cavendish.

Here in the US, due to industrialization, I struggle to find good fruit and vegetables in general, let alone tropical. They’re all picked too soon, travel too far, and have barely any flavor compared to home grown - and I’m in California! There’s a few specialized tropical fruit growers in Florida but it’s not even legal to ship much of that stuff here

I was lucky to grow up in a tropical seaside city in Mexico. Mangoes and papayas were everywhere. Papayas never went to waste, but mangoes were almost a plague, old trees will drop kilos of ripened mangoes every day, and some people had several trees in their backyard.

Our house didn't have a tree, but you could take a bag and just walk around the neighborhood, because people put fresh mangoes on their fences for others to take for free before they spoiled. Naturally ripened mangoes are indeed on a different level, but they last so little before fermenting because they're very sweet.

Had a Rumani mango tree at home while growing up. Small, extremely juice mangos. Ate hundreds every season. Nothing else comes close.

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