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Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact:

In open fields in Spain you can harvest around 4 kilograms of tomatoes per square metre. A Dutch high-tech greenhouse produces 80 kilograms per square metre and with four times less water.

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Do the Dutch ones end up tasting less like water or are they still just as crap as anything not from a garden? Sort of joking sort of not, mass produced tomatoes end up tasting like nothing most of the time

Our Dutch tomatoes have no taste.

To be fair do tomatos in Spanish supermarkets taste much better?

No. They might even be imported from Holland.

Depends where. As you travel towards the south of the country or to the Canary Islands, tomatoes have a stronger tomato flavour.

Serious answer: it entirely depends on the variety of tomatoes being grown. There are some varieties that have been selected for taste. Typically, they will also have a very efficient supply chain with a super short duration between harvest to packaging to supermarket (packaging at the greenhouse, straight to distribution, to retail). They are typically about three times the price of the cheapest 'bulk' tomatoes (and also have a higher margin, in the end).

The main challenge with fruits, and especially tomatoes, is ripening versus shelf life. A tomato tastes best when it's as ripe as possible. Sweet, fragrant and full of flavor. However, at that very special time, it will burst on the vine or fall apart in your fruit basket within a day. Which is why you'll never find this quality in a supermarket. And why I grow tomatoes in my garden every summer :)

Great answer. I honestly love a great tomato, it can make 5th place burger #1, and I can eat it like an apple no problem, but it's tricky to get in the city.

Indeterminate tomatos constantly produce too and if you don’t have frost you can just keep it going.

Since there was such an emphasis on quantity, the Dutch tomatoes became known in the 80s as Wasserbomben in Germany. Taste has become more of a priority after we saw exports diminish. If you’re really interested: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...

Cool, thanks for the link. I didn't know there was any aspect of that phenomenon specific to the Netherlands, since I'm in Canada and everything at the shops is the same.

Let's just say that they are a perfect match for the Dutch palate..

They are notorious around Europe for being mostly tasteless, but I think it's changing a bit. Many supermarkets here now often have "luxury" tomatoes that try to compete on taste. For example try the "Tasty Tom" variety when you can find it, it actually tastes pretty good despite being a hydroponic greenhouse tomatoe.

Less fun fact: Netherlands is only second to Belgium when it comes to PFAS contamination in fruit produce exports in Europe. 27% contamination on average.

How much more energy spent though?

Also how do they taste? My recollection of Dutch tomatoes is they they are not very good. Bland, watery.

Generally in agriculture (and other domains too) when you maximize output the quality suffers. And tomatoes are no exception. Growing your own or finding a small hobby grower and greatly appreciating their efforts are your best bets for having actual tasty stuff. Tomatoes are no longer true luxury food but tasty tomatoes are.

Well... (if I am calculating correctly)

A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic... at 40W/sqft). That's a bit higher than the 80kg/m^2 estimate, but I don't have the wattage requirements for the lower yield. But, assuming it is linear, about 20Wh/g-tomato.

And then, from a climate impact standpoint... The marginal CO2 emissions factor in the Netherlands is pretty high at ~0.6kg/kWh, so ~2kg-CO2 for every (~6oz) tomato. That is about 200-300x higher than the CO2 from trucking (refrigerated) tomatoes from Spain to Netherlands (~30-40kg-CO2/ton-tomato/1000 miles ~= 7g-CO2/tomato).

The local ecological (water+fertilizer+pesticide) impact is probably higher in Spain (vs the greenhouse construction and land use in the Netherlands), though it is hard to know how much to trade that off.

Vaclav Smil had some interesting calculations on tomatoes too - in his book 'How the World really works'.

(link not from the book, but very similar) https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tomatoes-I...

And the dutch ones might as well be bags of water.

Well, you see, water is cheap. Heat is not..

I am a novice Spanish tomato grower, I planted tomatoes in my 2 square meters raised bed last summer. It gave me more than 4 kilograms, and I did many things wrong.

This is obviously just anecdotal, but your numbers for Spain might be too low.

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