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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

That said, blueberries and butter are great.

Remember: pretty much everything you see is in service of someone's business model.

People always conceptualize business deals as win-lose: one side got the better of the other and someone was ripped off.

In reality, good business is all about win-win or win-win-win.

The blueberry producer won. The person who did the ad won. And the consumer won, because blueberries are healthier for you than like 90% of other food choices.

There's no practical difference between being 'manipulated' and showing you a reasonable argument for adopting a healthier diet.

Store bought blueberries are garbage. Even the frozen “cultivated wild” (wtf is that) ones.

If it’s not bought from the side of the road in northern Ontario or Quebec (and probably some other places), you don’t know what you’re missing.

Agree. Same is true for medicine. Store bought ones are garbage. I always buy from vendors selling at street corners.

They aren't remotely the same thing dude. Medicine is better when it gets made at a factory instead of in someone's back yard. Fruits and vegetables are better when they are made locally (which can be someone's back yard), rather than being shipped halfway across the country/world.

Some medicines aren’t available at the pharmacy and the locally produced varieties fill a market gap. Ethical hits for the modern druggie.

Agree. Seems being vocal for local hit the raw nerve.

Store bought blueberries are fine. Frozen blueberries are fine. It's food, worry about things that matter.

I have a couple of strawberry pots by the window in my apartment. The flavor is way better than anything store bought. It's the same thing with picking and eating blueberries straight out of the bush, or from some roadside stall.

Something to do with the commercial varieties being selected for transport and size/color rather than flavor. Also I believe the commercial fruits are picked as soon as they seem ripe, while I can wait longer for them to get sweeter and I don't have to care about transportation spoiling the fruit.

The transportation thing is what I've heard as well. Basically, the fruits are picked before they fully ripen so they don't get damaged in transport. For that reason you'll see chefs (e.g. J Kenji Lopez-Alt) recommend that you use canned tomatoes rather than fresh when you can. Tomatoes destined for canning are chosen for flavor and not beauty, and are picked when fully ripe. So you will generally get superior flavor from canned tomatoes.

Food is something that matters. It's one of life's great joys.

I have no idea why the hell people are being so hard on you. I haven't had good fresh blueberries, but it is well known that food tends to be better when you get it fresh from the place where it is grown. I can certainly vouch that tomatoes and strawberries that you get at the store are but a pale imitation of what you get if you can get them fresh.

Maybe blueberries are an exception to this trend, but I doubt it. I'm 100% willing to believe that they are way better if you grow them yourself or get them from some farmer who grew them himself.

Honestly, fresh, frozen, store bought, and and all blueberries. They all taste like crunchy water to me.

We had a blueberry farm less than 5 miles from our house. My family just raves about how good the fresh blueberries are.

Crunchy water. They all taste like crunchy water. I wonder what's wrong with my taste capacity that there is an absolute absence of detection of blueberry.

I don’t think it’s the freshness factor, but rather the difference between wild/bush picked and cultivated.

On the grocery-destined side, there’s probably an aspect of strain selection and farming practices that focuses on bulk without regard to flavour+texture.

> I have no idea why the hell people are being so hard on you.

I think it's this and the gatekeeping in general.

> Store bought blueberries are garbage.

They're obviously not garbage and some people don't have access to fresh Blueberries.

I can't really fault OP for that. I would absolutely say that store bought tomatoes are garbage, even though I buy and eat them. The quality is so much better with fresh tomatoes that I think it's fair to say that the store bought ones are garbage. I understood OP as meaning the same thing with respect to blueberries.

I'm not saying they taste good. I just have a different definition of garbage then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tomatoes are an example of something that's not great especially out of season at the supermarket. I do support my local farmstand during the summer but for some fruits and vegetables there's less of a difference than with others. Honestly a lot of the time when I buy local low bush blueberries in Maine, they're frozen

The tomatoes I grow in my backyard are leagues better than any tomato sold in stores around here. It really does make a difference. No wonder a lot of people are so lukewarm on produce. The stuff people buy in the store is junk!

Oh yeah the difference in quality is incredible. I can't grow tomatoes to save my life, but I love to get them from my local farmers market in the summer. They have so much more flavor that it's hard to believe they come from the same species of plant.

Strawberries are the same thing, like I mentioned in my post. I encourage everyone to go pick strawberries at least once in their life. I like strawberries well enough normally. When you get them fully ripe, fresh from the plant, they are heavenly. It's something everyone should experience.

There are so many kinds of blueberries, and they all get sold without specifying what kind. There's also a matter of taste. I've had blueberries I like and blueberries I feel meh about from the store. I prefer less tart and some people prefer more tart.

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