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Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey. Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful, or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a year long contract and the local producers get shut out during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets and CSAs near me.

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This so much.

People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.

It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.

Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.

That’s why they’re the best example.

Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought

That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.

When I worked for an indoor-ag company whose big deal was picking varietals for flavor, rather than ability to travel across the country, I always pointed to how much tomatoes had changed in my lifetime as to why travel-ready produce was a problem.

Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.

What gets me, is people don't understand.

Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.

Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.

Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.

Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.

Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!

Oh, same with my father. He would tell stories about going to the markets in Algeria when he was a kid and how it was totally normal to have fruit sellers cut into a melon right then and there to give you a sample. If it sucked you just wouldn't buy it, so there was always competition for having the best produce in the market. And this was him complaining to me about poor quality produce in the US when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s -- the quality has only gotten worse since then.

Food just tastes better in other countries.

> Food just tastes better in other countries.

This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.

Sure, maybe! Although I've generally found that the overall quality of ingredients tends to be better in the places I've traveled compared to the US. That's not to say I haven't picked up great figs at a bodega in the mission, or don't get good berries at the farmers markets near me in NYC. But if I walk into the produce aisle in most grocery stores in the US these days there is abundance, yet a lack of quality.

Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.

As a general rule, fruits and vegetables are much better quality on the US west coast because so much of it is produced locally. The difference in produce quality is quite noticeable. In the parts of Europe where I've spent a lot of time, the average vegetable quality and selection is noticeably worse than e.g. Seattle, but that mostly reflects the Pacific Northwest being a major high-quality producer of surprisingly diverse fruit and vegetables.

Absolutely, west coast has better produce in general than we do here in NYC. No argument there.

By "Western cities" do you include the San Francisco Bay Area, when you shop at quality grocery stores? I keep hearing we are supposed to have some of the best food in the world.

>People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.

You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."

I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.

Of course Westerners know what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. We can in fact grow them and do.

Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.

Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.

> They look like berries

Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.

To be charitable to people who shop with their eyes, the people who shop with their mouths usually get tossed out of the store :P

We can both recognize that it's amazing AND that we can do better. Is the solution to stop carrying blueberries or to demand better?

Personally I’d say stop carrying fresh blueberries until they’re in season. I use frozen ones in my vitamix the rest of the year and they’re great!

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