Why do strawberries seldom live up to their promise? | Hacker News Reader

Why do strawberries seldom live up to their promise?

newyorker.com

22 pointsbookofjoe46 comments

This is true for almost all modern fruit and vegetables. The varieties you can buy in most supermarkets have been selected for yield, hardiness in the field, and ability to be transported. Unless the farmer is niche, flavor doesn't even come into play as a factor.

Add to that fact that transportation now includes going halfway across the world because consumers want the fruit available all year long, and that makes things even more complicated.

Not true at all. Bananas are such an incredible counterexample, so ubiquitous that we barely even think about them. In my mind, they are clearly the best fruit. I have never had a banana that looks better than it tastes. Bright yellow bananas will always taste good. This is because the Cavendish is a clone, which leads to their vulnerability to pests but the point still stands.

Another great counterexample is grapes. Grapes almost always taste great.

Apples are all fairly horrible except the Cosmic Crisp. The rest are bland and disappointing.

Mangoes and nectarines are also fantastic when they’re in season. The yellow mangoes, not the red ones.

Blackberries are also great. Our grocery store has some really big berries, albeit on the pricier side.

Seriously though, a bowl full of fresh fruits is vastly preferable to ice cream or any other synthetic dessert. I feel bad for people who are stuck with cantaloupe and gala apples.

> Apples are all fairly horrible except the Cosmic Crisp. The rest are bland and disappointing.

You must have had some bad apples (pun intended).

Any apple that's a hybrid of a Royal Gala and something else is guaranteed to at least be crisp and somewhat sweet.

Royal Gala is crisp, a little less sweet and acidic, and has a fairly watery taste (not necessarily a bad thing—imagine drinking off a cold, fast-flowing creek).

Pink Lady is very crisp, sweeter, and more acidic.

Envy apples are top-tier apples. Crisp, sweet, similarly watery to Royal Gala, and are usually immense. For me a single apple can stave off both lunch and dinner, it's superb. Although they are fairly expensive.

Fuji apples are equally large but considerably less sweet, though still crisp and watery.

I’ve had far too manager mushy gala apples to want them again. When they’re greats they’re great. When they’re bad, they’re terrible

Most apples are similar to dragonfruits. Somewhat sweet but mostly watery. I’ve never had an Envy apple so I’ll have to give that a shot, but most other apples are basically what you’ve described: not offensive just not something I’d seek out.

> Bright yellow bananas will always taste good.

Not to me. I love bananas, but I don't think they start tasting good until they've started to freckle.

> feel bad for people who are stuck with cantaloupe

Don't feel bad for me! I love cantaloupe even more than bananas.

> Don't feel bad for me! I love cantaloupe even more than bananas.

Just like certain animals have ecological niches, you must be feasting at certain corporate parties.

Oh, god, no. I avoid those like the plague.

One can make ice cream and put fresh (mushed) fruits into it. Or at least 'upgrade' supermarket/grocery store ice cream with them. Same goes for yoghurt, and/or combinations of that with ice cream :)

I learned this when I had strawberries from the Bon Marche in Antibes. I was there in season, and the strawberries were small and “ugly” by supermarket standards, but my word did they taste like nothing else on earth. When you know, it’s like an awakening.

> because consumers want the fruit available all year long, and that makes things even more complicated

I'd be interested to see an independent study of household preferences on this.

I suspect most people in my circle would prefer tasty, nutritious, local, and seasonal over the current situation.

No study needed. The simple experience of selling fruit at a fruit stand and making pies and such with blemished produce is evidence enough. There is nothing wrong with blemished fruit, but because it's imperfect and the buyer doesn't know what signals to look for in produce selection, they fallback to superficial signals. Ignorance is human nature.

I don’t have anything other than anecdotal evidence unfortunately. Most people I know don’t even think about seasonality, except as a possible cause of price fluctuations. Many people I know just say “I like X fruit or vegetable.” and will buy it if it’s a decent price.

For me, my kids are the primary drivers of what fruits we have around the house.

Almost always, they prefer poor quality in their favorite fruits to top quality of less favorable fruits.

> I suspect most people in my circle would prefer tasty, nutritious, local, and seasonal over the current situation.

If we did that at any meaningful scale our whole food system would have to change. I'd welcome it personally, but at least in the US our system is a fragile house of cards and I don't think people would be prepared for what may change or break along the way.

> I suspect most people in my circle would prefer tasty, nutritious, local, and seasonal over the current situation.

Your local monopsony grocery chain, however, does not. And they, not you, are the volume buyer who matters.

In addition, most consumers, very specifically, will buy uniformly colorful, firm, tasteless fruit over anything even slightly bruised.

About the best you can do as a consumer is try to find actual farmer's markets and spend your money locally.

Grow your own herbs and tomatoes. It's pretty simple and the upside is worth it.

Don't forget that many have also been bred to be harvested out of season. There is a lot of money in being able to produce strawberries/tomatoes/etc. outside of peak strawberry/tonato/etc. season. They will taste awful, but people will still buy them — and they pay a premium for them, too.

Anyone interested in genuinely delicious strawberries should be in Oregon in June for the Hood and Benton varieties. These berries are too short in season and delicate to be available broadly, and are (my opinion) never a disappointment like more “commercial” varieties.

Strawberries are also grown commercially between Watsonville and Santa Cruz. There's also some grow on a small scale between Chico and Paradise, hope the fire didn't get them.

Grocery fruits and vegetables are largely pretty cardboard poisoned with industrial farming residues. If you want decent fruits and vegetables, about the only choice is to buy local organic or grow them yourself.

Here in Norway our locally produced strawberries are always a big deal, as they taste orders of magnitude better than imported ones.

Stalls pop up all over selling them direct from farms, and the first ones of the season usually go for $10+ for a ~500g/1lbs basket.

Part of it is the short time from they're picked and till they're in the stores/stalls for sale. Another is the specific breed of strawberries, there's a large variety between the various ones. But our weather plays a large role[1], up north with our long sunny days and cool nights combining to make the berries grow slower and taste more.

To me they most certainly live up to their promise, and enjoy them a lot each season.

[1]: https://www.nytnorge.no/artikler/en-guide-til-norske-jordbae...

> an exposé in which a promising-looking specimen is cut in half and revealed to be watery-white inside

Yeah no. At least here, the flavor is in the colored bits. The white bits are mostly just water indeed. The best ones here have a deeply saturated red color almost entirely throughout.

And you don't want them too large, preferably around half an inch in diameter. I joke that all strawberries being born with the same amount of flavor, it just gets spread out as they grow.

Given the writer lives in Britain she would do well to forget about farmed berries and forage for wild blackberries instead. Urban, suburban, rural, they're everywhere.

They're bang in season at the moment and my wife and I are getting half a kilo (a pound) in about 40 mins of lazy picking in the mornings before work. They are absolutely delicious and freeze well for cakes, crumbles and such in the winter.

We have wild black raspberries all over. Enough that I was just wondering a few hours ago if it would be less effort to spray some with herbicide than take them out with the brushcutter.

Anyway, they are delicious, but we've had ridiculous amounts of rain this summer. All the rain seems to have made them flower and grow earlier than usual and die off much faster. Normally there's fruit for about a solid month. I think we barely got a week this hear :-(

Come to think of it, the wild plums are usually ripe at the end of August. I should go check that they aren't also ripening early, because they don't last long.

> spray some with herbicide than take them out with the brushcutter

Brings back a funny memory. First day of school in Oregon, teacher asks a bunch of kids what they did for vacation. One boy says his dad paid him to take out blackberries. A new girl, from Texas, spoke up: "Why on earth would you kill a berry bush?"

A real, "you're not from around here are ya?" moment. In western Oregon, blackberries are so pervasive and grow so fast, you have to fight then off to save your property!

Yeah. That's pretty much where I am at this point.

I tried growing my own strawberries this summer. Fully organic, full sun. They tasted awful. I won’t be rerunning that experiment. The store bought ones are hit and miss. The problem is it’s basically impossible to tell the difference.

I also tried the “sweetest batch” thing that the All In podcast recommended. Still mediocre. Grapes, mangoes, and nectarines are consistently a far better option.

Everything is so financialized that most people will die not knowing what a strawberry tastes like. That's dystopian.

Usually we think private equity sucks the life out of a company, leaving an empty husk. It doesnt end there. They sucked profits out of the flavor of strawberries.

In 30 years the owning class will own everybody's bodily organs, mark my words.

> Everything is so financialized that most people will die not knowing what a strawberry tastes like. That's dystopian.

It's true for almost all basic needs and that makes me sad. Most people would die not tasting great drinking water or enjoying uninterrupted electricity we take for granted.

Find a strawberry farm near you that lets you "pick your own". Chances are these will be the best berries you taste that season. Same for any fruit or vegetables, really. There's a farm near me that does pick your own potatoes, asparagus, snap peas, etc. Barring that, buy directly from the farmer at a farmer's market or roadside stand on the edge of their property. The closer you can get from farm to table, the better the food will taste.

To be honest, I’ve done strawberry picking at local farms, and I haven’t noticed a substantial difference from a taste standpoint. I think the earlier comment about the “variety” of strawberries likely plays a big factor.

Jose Andres, a well-known chef, recommends peeling strawberries!

https://www.tapasmagazine.es/en/the-reason-why-jose-andres-r...

It depends where you live. I'm in the Bay Area and strawberries are definitely not disappointing. In fact for several months of the year they are like food out of the Garden of Eden. You can recognize when they are in season by the uniform deep, crimson color of all the berries in the batch. And the price: cheap strawberries means there are a lot of them.

We usually get Tomatero Farms strawberries. Driscolls is OK but better for raspberries in my opinion. In season they all come from farms in locations like Monterey County, which is not far away. You have to eat them quickly, though, or they go bad.

I’m in the Bay Area too. Sometimes they’re pretty good when in season, but very few compare to the candy-like strawberries I picked straight off the plant in my childhood. If I’m lucky, a couple of strawberries from a farmer’s market pint will remind me of those. (Same goes for tomatoes and cucumbers.)

Driscolls is absolute garbage in my opinion. They always look pretty and are ubiquitous in many major markets but the taste has always been lacking.

The best strawberries in the Bay Area are from the Japanese-American farms. They're not beholden to the "Big Ag" lab grown berries Driscolls and actually taste good but they're extremely seasonal and sometimes hard to find.

This could be just faulty memory but my impression is that Driscolls was better 15 years ago. They are pretty heavy into optimization for the market and constrain growers to follow very exacting standards for product. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/driscolls-stra...

Get a local farm CSA. Your berries will be bangin. Mine right now are tart and sweet and red. They’re smaller than you get in the store and ten times better.

Our local CSA always uses their strawberry crop to signal the start of their summer season. The weather has been tough this year and some of their crops have struggled, but the strawberries we did get were still excellent compared to what you get in a grocery store.

Article doesn't mention that strawberries actually grow in and stay most fresh in a mild heat.

> If you buy the strawberries and you leave them in your car, then you go put gas in it, if you open the door and your car smells like hot trash—the strawberries are probably really good.

In addition to other factors mentioned, refrigerating strawberries diminishes their flavor.

breeding Strwabs for size has reduced their flavour. I was just in the Dolomites eating tiny wild strawberries, and they were a fruit explosion.

Yep, tiny wild strawberries were like treasure during my childhood... No comparison!

https://archive.ph/53DRq

Y'all need to try Belgian strawberries, they never disappoint. The only time I had that bland experience was when buying cheaper, redder ones, from Spain I think.

Who the hell writes this crap?

It's leisure-class over-analysis. For it to work, you have to be revealing something profound about the world, or analyzing the class gap itself (why some people don't have time to analyze).

This bit from Camus' The Plague has always stuck with me as analysis done right:

"He walks quickly. When crossing a street, he steps off the sidewalk without changing his pace, but two out of three times makes a little hop when he steps on to the sidewalk on the other side. He is absentminded and, when driving his car, often leaves his side-signals on after he has turned a corner. Always bareheaded. Looks knowledgeable."

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