Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood | Hacker News Reader

Tomato nostalgia as I relive my Croatian island childhood

croatiaweek.com

186 pointsgascoigne211 comments

I am Croatian, and I know exactly what the article is referring to. So much that we decided to grow our own tomatoes this year.

The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally, and the reality is that we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists.

We were very lucky to have a great harvest of cherry, monte carlo, and plum tomatoes this year, all of which serve a different purpose:

- Cherry for salads and side dish

- Monte Carlo for cooking

- Plum tomatoes for everything in between

Croatia has incredible food, especially the local, homegrown stuff, and it is well worth the effort to get it.

Here's an image of some of our crop: https://imgur.com/5FfdvG6

> Croatia has incredible food ..

and a great 80's power pop surf band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZCuCg-UM-U

( even if they were ex-pat croatians )

Another croatian chiming in, I get most of my vegetables from my mother's garden, I think that's true for a lot of croats who live in the cities but have parents in the countryside.

So, where in Makarska region should one go to get some? ;)

Are those "local" sellers near the beach really local? Or do they just resell stuff from Kaufland/Lidl to naive tourists for inflated prices?

I don't know, the green market (pazar) should be local farmers (OPG), but a common story is that some of them buy at supermarkets and resell at higher prices.

Not a Croatian, but I visit the Zadar / Ugljan area every couple of years. Last time a Bosnian friend visited from Banja Luka and she brought some tomatoes with her. They were phenomenal <3

Bosnian here from near Banja Luka and fully agree. Like others said it's mostly about being home grown and most importantly picked at the right time. But, Krajina tomatoes kick things ;).

Ex-pat Croat here. I came for a visit recently and I can't figure out how in the world there are so many Kauflands/Lidls/Konzums everywhere. Compared to Boston Metrowest the density just seems way out of whack. Is it the lack of property taxes? Maybe it's the tourists?

Well, from my experience, Lidl and Kaufland have stores pretty much everywhere in Europe. The Croatian ones are usually packed full of locals and tourists.

Quite a lot of people who travel to the Adriatic Coast use them to resupply. The local supermarkets are a lot more expensive, so if you're staying in an apartment at the beach for a week or two, it's worth it to make a few trips to a nearby Lidl to buy all the food, even if it means some extra driving.

Most stores there are probably quite empty during winter.

Italian here. I agree that anything coming from NL is complete garbage.

I live in NL and I found out that the best bonding discussion topic between expats from the Mediterranean area is the nostalgy for flavorful tomatoes.

Agree in general, although cheese (Old Amsterdam) and flowers (tulips) are fine for their price.

Spent about a week and a half in Croatia (mainly on Vis). Food was quite flavorful. We spent the prior ten days across the Adriatic in Vieste/the Gargano. Both countries have great food. Bread, for me, wasn't as good in Croatia as it was in Italy.

The thing is, you can now find good all year grown tomatoes in shops, just not in Croatian shops unfortunately. (speaking as a Croatian living in Denmark) In Denmark, even Lidl now has premium tomatoes that have good taste and smell. They are "pricy", so they are on average x3 the default tasteless, unripe ones. Considering they are properly ripe, part of the price is certainly just to cover much greater waste due to them going bad or getting bruised.

>The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally

Considering how far north Netherlands is, and how gloomy the weather is, I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good place to grow tomatoes. I thought Italy was the big tomato exporter in the EU.

Netherlands is one of the most agriculturally productive nations on the planet. They simply have the greenhouse industry, port and rail infrastructure to ship out what they grow very efficiently. You can get the best tomatoes in southern Europe but unless you turn that tomato sauce or can them it's going to waste. Tomatoes are some of the most difficult veg to ship. Ripening and transporting tomatoes is a tricky problem to get right.

Why do tomatoes from Netherlands look so perfect, but taste so bland? I never understand it. I guess that they look perfect because they are grown in a green house, so no pests.

Real question: Why do tomatoes from south Europe taste so much better? Is it the sunshine, or the soil? Or is the gene stock of the tomatoes? Or... everything?

Tomatoes are a climacteric fruit, meaning they have a ripening period after which they start to decompose. Mass-produced climacteric fruits are picked underripe to ensure stability during transport.

The flavours that make garden-fresh tomatoes develop only when the fruit is allowed to ripen on the vine. As a result, you’re very likely not to have full flavour from supermarket fruit.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6895250/

Tomatoes in supermarkets are varieties that are optimized to survive transport and storage and are not harvested at peak ripeness.

But tomatoes from Spain and Morocco taste much better than those from Netherlands even if transport is significantly longer - how to explain it?

That's not my experience.

IME all store tomatoes taste bland because they were picked unripe for transport. That's why it's recommended to use canned tomatoes whenever you can, they are much tastier as they are picked at the right time and quickly canned.

I think it's the soil. My intuition is that Dutch tomatoes grow in hydroponics or a similar environment that is poor in minerals and other micronutrients. I am sure they could replicate the soil and flavor of an Italian tomato, but perhaps it would be too expensive to do so. But in the supermarket, the word "Dutch" on a tomato is a scarlet letter: I know I'm not going to buy it.

Mainly soil and the climate. I have imported soil and I get in my garten incredibly tasty tomatoes. Sun is sparse so they take longer to ripe but the taste is original.

It's the sun, which the tomatoes need. Additionally my guess is most of the tomatoes in the Netherlands are grown in greenhouses which are usually coated with UV protection, and the tomatoes do well with UV light.

I have tomatoes myself and this year they haven't tasted that great, and there's been a lot of rain and little sunshine compared to prior years. In the south of Europe you can grow the tomatoes outside although I think these days the commercial ones are also grown in e.g. polytunnels because they can get the products faster to the market.

Netherlands produce really edible tomatos, just your suplier buys D category produce instead of A, which is expensive. I'm surprised that Italy or Spain can't match (maybe because of price) on my supermarket shelf. I don't challenge homegrown tomato - they are superior! But you have to survive winter somehow.

Please forgive me to disagree wholeheartedly and completely. After several years of "let's check again if tomatoes from Netherlands are still bad" I have completely stopped buying them altogether. They look great, smell good, and taste absolutely bland.

Price does not make any distinction whatsoever, from my point of view. Or we only get the "cheap" stuff in all our shops here if the tomatoes are from Netherlands. And I do like to pay for good vegetables, esp. tomatoes (the ones I am buying are from Spain, locally grown or seldomly from the Balkans).

I would say the best cherry tomatoes from Netherlands are passable for cooking.

One note about the smell is that it could be just the green part where the fruit still is attached to, so it's easy to get deceived. Tomato plants have a strong smell themselves.

Sounds like you’re not in NL. I am, and for the past ten years or so new varieties of locally grown tomatoes have appeared that are markedly better. Not as good as fresh Puglian tomatoes during harvest season, but much, much better than the infamous water bombs the Netherlands is known for internationally.

Problem is, they’re somewhat expensive (or rather, not insanely cheap), and, likely for that reason, only available over locally. For some reason the rest of Europe insists on buying only the cheap flavorless water bombs.

You get what you pay for, I guess (said Puglian tomatoes, in season, aren’t cheap either).

> Netherlands produce really edible tomatos

I love how you use "edible" as a superlative to describe food. Yes, Dutch tomatoes are very edible indeed.

But where I can get some tasty and flavourful tomatoes?

I'm from the Netherlands and

> The imported junk we get from Netherlands is abysmal compared to anything grown locally, and the reality is that we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists.

This hurts, and it's absolutely true.

Makes me wonder why we spend so much in subsidies for the dutch tomato growers, if nobody actually likes eating them.

For what it's worth, I get them in the supermarket, grown in spain, if at all possible.

To be fair Looye honey tomatoes are tasty (and expensive), although I find them a bit on the "artificial tasty" side. Tasty Toms are quite ok. Snack tomatoes (snoeptomaatjes) are a hit and miss.

While I admire these successes, the hard truth is that 90% of the Dutch tomato produce is landfill material. Overall tomato cultivation in the Netherlands feels like a vanity project to prove the farming prowess of the country.

There was an item about this on the news where they interviewed a grower about this (it was strawberries in that item, but it's basically the same idea) and the grower was sad about it as well, because he hated the supermarkets for forcing them to sell inferior product.

The problem is not that they can't make delicious food, it's that no one is willing to pay for it. Strawberries are already expensive, and perfectly ripe strawberries would be even more expensive.

You have the slightly tastier "Tasty Tom" tomatoes that are 30% more expensive that are already a tough sell.

The harsh truth is that people keep buying the trash tomatoes, so the growers grow them.

There's also a weird spiral going on where life has become more expensive, which made things like farming good tasting tomatoes on a Croatian island infeasible, which in turn made good tasting tomatoes too expensive to buy for people living on a Croatian island.

Maybe the Netherlands are different, but I find it's usually not that specific countries make trash fruits and veggies, but export-bound fruits and vegetables have transport concerns that require them to be picked before they reach their peak. Here, american blueberries and strawberries are big, bland and watery, local ones are juicy, sweet, tart and delicious. Or corn, theirs is bland, ours is sweet. But I'm not convinced that americans that live near those farms have the same experience at all.

When I grow my tomatoes, they are usually picked at their peak ripeness, they were being pumped full of sugar and nutrients by the plant until the last second when I picked them and cooked with them. The ones that have to travel are picked before ripe, and "ripen" sad and alone in a truck with no extra nutrients, and when they reach me looking "ripe", it's usually a facade. Local market fruits and vegetables stand somewhere in between, depending on volume and channel it's being sold in.

There is a difference though between fruits and vegetables imported for year round availability, and those imported as a seasonal bounty; the later ones maintain quality as it sells relatively quickly in season and doesn't need to be picked as much in advance.

Yeah, eating local and in season fruits and vegetables should give you all the benefits. Eating imported/out of season fruits and vegetables will come but with worse taste and probably more expensive.

> corn, theirs is bland, ours is sweet.

Maize starts converting sugars into starches the moment it's harvested. That's why fresh-picked is so important: even within a few hours, the flavor changes.

That's also why frozen or canned corn is a good idea: picked at the peak of ripeness and almost immediately has its enzymes deactivated either by freezing or boiling. Aside from texture issues (which won't matter for many applications like soups and smoothies), frozen vegetables and berries have better taste than "fresh" from the produce department for most products, most of the year. Also why so many cooks swear by canned tomatoes for sauces: they're better quality tomatoes picked at peak ripeness, but the only way they can travel is frozen or canned. And nobody freezes tomatoes; it screws up the texture so badly that canning is no worse and possibly better, plus it's expensive to deal with cold chain (whereas a pallet of San Marzano tomatoes can sit on a shelf until it rusts through with little loss of flavor and no maintenance other than the shelf it sits on).

>> we want the good stuff for ourselves, not the tourists

What does that mean, tourists steal your tomatoes at night?

It seems odd that a country with a temperate climate like Croatia would be importing produce from the Netherlands. Is this common?

I'm Polish expat living in Norway. There are no tomatoes to be had in Norway... Just kidding. I'm actually kind of alright with the small ones (pearl tomatoes), any other don't taste like tomatoes. I believe, that the Norwegian people are so used to blandly tasting vegetables, that the worst and least ripe product parties are send to Norway.

But my wife and her family are tomato people. Every time we visit Poland or anybody from Poland visits us, they need to bring some malinowy (raspberry) tomatoes. Premium price, color slightly pinkish rather than true red, shape is a little bulbous, like a pumpkin, rather than perfect round like regular tomatoes.

You can actually get them (or other good tomatoes) even in many supermarkets, tho it's best to go to a local produce market. And ofc best ones can be had from people growing their own.

Same really goes for eggs - there is another dimension to taste and you get more sated eating less, if you can buy eggs from someone feeding the chicks properly. Though, if I had a car and knew a good source, I could probably buy better eggs here in Norway. However, supermarket eggs (and meat too) are much better in Norway. Most likely due to more stringent rules for animal farming, as Norway is not part of the EU and can have it's own, more strict rules. For example, Norwegian bacon doesn't smell like men's locker room after a football game (compared to swedish) and doesn't have a ton of water leave it when frying.

I won't comment on the tomatoes, but as far as eggs are concerned, I'm skeptical that any claims about people being able to taste any diffence would hold up in a proper blind taste test. Conclusion from Serious Eats when they attempted to do that:

  It was pretty clear evidence that as far as eggs go, the mindset of the taster has far more bearing on the flavor of the egg than the egg itself.

https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs

I boil six eggs every Sunday and eat one every morning. Same pan, same cooking element, same timing, ice bath with the same volume of water and cube quantity, everything identical from one week to the next. Have been doing it for at least seven years straight.

I want my yolks to be crystalline in texture, at the transition point between runny and chalky. Not precious about yolk colouring. Must be easy to peel.

There are absolutely differences in egg quality when it comes to boiling them.... Specific brands (some of the expensive/omega/free range etc ones too) reliably come out gelatinous and fiddly to peel. Some come out rubbery. Some just taste wrong and bland, even when I sprinkle with Maldon salt flakes. Not one egg, the entire batch.

Over years of trial and error, I found a brand where I can guarantee a consistent textural outcome from my process, and every morning I exclaim "THAT is a good boiled egg" after finishing it.

I've always thought a lot had to do with the age of the eggs. Very fresh eggs are usually harder to peel. I usually let eggs sit at least a week or two after purchase before I use them (this is in the USA where eggs are sold refrigerated).

It's the opposite for poaching, fresh hold together much better

I find that the cheapest kind of eggs poach much better because they have a much higher turnover in the supermarket so they are much fresher. The fancy omega eggs and other specialty ones are quite old in comparison.

Blind folded is not a proper taste test though.

One uses all the senses when eating. For eggs the quality of the yolk is obvious by looking.

I guess the idea is that you're "blind" to the brand, origin etc of the egg. You don't know anything about it other than what's directly in front of you.

Although now you bring it up,it would be interesting to see whether actually blindfolded taste tests would confirm or deny your idea that the visible quality of the yolk correlates with it's (non-visible) taste.

The meaning "blind" being used here is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment

It has nothing to to with depriving a participant of their sense of sight (except incidentally.)

Reminds me of the time I tricked my housemate years ago by drinking his fancy single malt scotch then replacing the contents with some really cheap Spanish whisky. He came home took a sip and said "aaah, you can't beat the taste of a fine Scottish single malt". The bottle and label were enough to convince him it tasted good.

(NB I'm not claiming there is no difference in flavour and quality - there absolutely is - but it's interesting how easily suggestible people are by the external appearance)

I am shocked how good is a 10 USD bottle of whisky or Japanese shochu or wine these days. I think the science of making booze has improved so much in the last couple of decades.

This.

In my student days, thirty years ago, you would have to be careful buying wine from a supermarket as it could be borderline undrinkable.

Nowadays? Not so much. Even the cheapest swill is drinkable. Not really nice or flavorful, but certainly not disgusting.

I believe there might be certain feeds that could affect taste, hearing story of how chickens fed with fish had fish taste... But if the main feed is mostly same, the taste should be mostly same. And I doubt any producer has anything that would add any offtastes.

I worked for a few years at egg manufacturing plant. I was entitled to quite some eggs per month. I also had access / relatives who would give us some home chicken eggs. Personally, I don't taste any difference. Yeah, the yolk is different color, but I don't bother.

But I'm a point in statistics where I'm not someone who can do taste tests as I cannot discern slight changes in recipe.

I live in a baltic state and as for tomatoes, I always enjoy when someone gives home-grown ones. When it is season they are OK in supermarket too. But nothing beats homegrown ones. However when there is no season, I don't like market tomatoes - "tastes as rubber".

> Norway is not part of the EU and can have it's own, more strict rules.

EU doesn't prevent having more strict rules than baseline they set.

EU does prevent stricter rules. If a product meeting regulations can't be sold somewhere in the single market area, it's grounds for EU court case. That's why all the food producing states like Austria, France, Italy go around it with tax breaks and "product of X" stamps.

Note that while a state can have stricter rules for production, they can't prevent import and sale of products from less strict states of the single market area.

Most of the ones in Norwegian supermarkets are imported crap seemingly produced by infusing a rubber ball with water, painting it red and then chemically removing all the flavor. But the locally produced ones from Wiig are good.

Norwegian here

Yeah, that's unfortunately the sad fact of living here, even more so the longer north you go - there's really no such thing as "in-season" veggies. Closest would be potatoes, and maybe some other things at the farmers markets.

We're all used to everything pretty much tasting like water. I was 22 years old the first time I tasted "real" tomatoes in southern Europe.

What we do have, though, is fresh seafood - if you live along the coast. But that's not for everyone. I usually buy freshly caught cod/haddock/pollock/halibut from the local fish market, as well as shrimp and king crab, which isn't horribly expensive when you live so close to the (beginning of the) supply chain.

There are lots of vegetables grown in Norway that tastes better than the imported vegetables, and are available in normal grocery shops. The season for each vegetable is short, so you need to get them while they are available.

It's hard to describe how drastic the difference is between a store-bought tomato and one that is homegrown. It's something you immediately miss once the season is gone and the tomato plants are composted, and you're hoping you saved enough jars to make it until next summer.

But one thing that surprised me after a little while gardening is that there is a similarly stark difference for homegrown carrots. Everybody knows what a carrot tastes like from the store, but I had never tasted a carrot that stopped me in my tracks until I took up gardening. It's just like with tomatoes: a richer, sweeter flavor that is virtually nonexistent in the supermarket. If you love growing your own tomatoes, I can't recommend growing your own carrots highly enough.

As a fellow gardener, this probably has to do with the type of tomato/carrot that you grow. For example, the carrots in your garden are probably of the sweeter variety than store-bought carrots.

Was going to say the same. Tomatoes vary hugely in many aspects; you can't really talk about a 'tomato', they're so different.

(anyone tasted a potato fruit? Toxic and like little green tomatoes, but I wonder at their taste)

FYI, it seems canned tomatoes don't have this problem.

When I try to do a side by side with canned tomato sauce and my own tomato sauce(unflavored, just mashed tomatoes), I lose every time.

If you haven’t you should try growing celery. The flavor difference is simply incredible.

I have wanted to, my SO said that it is hard from seed, and I never followed up on it. I can only imagine how much better it is--not to mention a soup or stew with carrots and celery from the garden is bound to be unbeatable.

Maybe that will be a 2025 gardening goal for me!

> It's hard to describe how drastic the difference is between a store-bought tomato and one that is homegrown.

Everyone says this, but I either have defective taste buds or defective garden tomatoes, because my garden tomatoes aren't really any different from a decent store-bought tomato when eaten fresh. For sauces, quality canned tomatoes are overwhelmingly superior to either.

I mean you have to have the climate and soil first

Carrots are really the best if they freeze lightly in my opinion. So sweet!

So, there is this guy in Croatia who specializes in collecting, cataloging, and sharing tomato seeds for free. He also creates his own varieties.

https://www.volim-rajcice.com/popis-rajcica.html https://www.facebook.com/groups/carstvo.rajcica/

A big kudos to Dražen from volim-rajčice (<3 tomatoes)

I live in Greece. While a lot of what the article says resonates with me, there’s a small detail that changes everything. Climate change. The last two years I haven’t eaten a decent tomato during summer. We had excessive heat waves the last two years, especially this year the whole summer is with temperatures above 35 which is unprecedented. This wrecks havoc in crops. It doesn’t affect tomatoes only, fruits also aren’t as delicious as they used to be, cucumbers seem tasteless and the list goes on.

I have very similar memories as a child, and also find it very difficult to get good tomatoes. There's great looking tomatoes, but they don't smell or taste right, and they are either too hard or floury mealy things.

When I can get good tomatoes - my favourite thing is to have them on toast. Just slice the tomato, put it on some toast with butter, (or olive oil). Breakfast, lunch, dinner... it's simple but delicious.

Anna Bay, just north of Newcastle in NSW, Australia used to have fantastic tomatoes. It was renowned in the region for it's fantastic tomatoes. The area had a huge flood of Italian immigrants just post WW2, and they brought the tomatoes with them.

You'd see a few little road-side stalls on the road to Nelson Bay. The supermarkets took over and those little stalls disappeared. Then some opportunistic folks set up stalls using commercially grown tomatoes from others selling them as Anna Bay tomatoes, but they're not the same.

Unfortunately this tactic seems to be becoming more common. We found someone selling Peaches and Nectarines by the side of the road. They offered us a sample, it was amazing. We bought two boxes at a reasonable price, they were almost all awful. Had the same thing with Cherries.

I also grew up eating traditional tomatoes, my favourite thing to do is toasting a slice of sourdough bread then cutting a tomato in half and smashing the two halves on the bread (it's a similar process to making smashed avo on toast - it won't work with supermarket tomatoes because they're too hard and not juicy enough); I add olive oil, a pinch of salt and sometimes oregano.

If you have a Harris Farm Markets near you (I think there is one in Newcastle which is not too far from Anna Bay), look for the "heirloom tomatoes" - they are usually placed in a basket as a mix of different heirloom varieties and you can pick the ones you like, they are traditional tomatoes, not the ones you usually see in supermarkets.

The smashed-tomato thing seems... inappropriate to do to a nice tomato. I'm sure it tastes great.

I'm no longer in NSW, but Coles recently had some "Heirloom Tomatoes" which looked like the ones from the article. Smelled great, but were all floury in the middle. Transport and cold storage seems to do bad things to them.

There's another fruit & veg shop nearby that sometimes has good tomatoes, but even at their best nothing like the Anna Bay tomatoes.

My understanding is that this has less to do with the specific location the tomatoes are grown, and more to do with the distance from the point of consumption they are grown. If the tomatoes have to travel a long distance, they will be picked before ripe so that they are more hardy during transit. Unfortunately this significantly alters the taste for the worse. I don't really live in the U.S. anymore, but I used to pay extra for "tomatoes still on the vine" which would be a small step up. The best of course were those grown in your own garden.

A coworker regularly emptied his fish tank onto his backyard tomato patch.

He would bring the results and leave them in the kitchenette, with instructions to wash them thoroughly.

They are the best that I have ever tasted.

We also use old fishtank water to fertilize our plants. Nitrogen!

You could also pee in a jug and dilute it with water.

I think the most important thing is the time between the tomato turns red and when you consume it. On a similar note, I find myself picking them when they are red or orange red, and waiting for them to turn red. I wonder if commercial farms pick them red and can them instantly, which is why canned tomato sauce tastes better than my tomato sauce.

Your understanding is not wrong, but it is not what this article is really about. There are lots of kinds of tomatoes, and there is at least one type that grows in the Mediterranean, that the author describes. If you are not familiar with this kind of tomato, you would simply reject it if you saw it: it doesn't look good, it is too large, too mushy, doesn't seem ripe. But then if you accidentally taste it, you realize that looks are not everything... I eat this kind of stuff when I'm in Greece, I'm guessing the Croatian variety is a bit different, but you can get these tomatoes in Italy or Spain as well. I presume they are not easy to transport, hence what you usually get in your average European supermarket is a produce of the Netherlands...

I will be in (northern) Italy next month, is there a name for this kind of tomato I can look for?

My brother's mom talks about how tomatoes are not tomatoes anymore. They used to be soft and much tastier but it was bad for shipping. Old cartoons would show tomatoes splattering when thrown. The tomatoes I grew up with bounce.

A word of warning.

Personally I am not touching the "homegrown stuff" vegetables from the home growers I don't personally know as: a few years back, it was uncovered (not Croatians only, this was wide spread in Adriatic region) smuggling EU forbidden pesticides from non EU countries into EU and selling them as they did improve harvest a lot. You can imagine this practice is impossible to control effectively and this is a huge issue, but also a huge potential for earnings.

It was also shown, that the home growers have mostly no education about pesticides usage and are using them by "over the thumb" rule, where the levels in vegetables can quickly go over the allowed levels (from before the pesticide was forbidden) and as such can be far more harmful than controlled vegetables from store chains/distributors that have their own laboratories to check for the toxic content - they are responsible and fined for what they distribute.

You can imagine, the nearest countries to Schengen borders were most affected. At that time Croatia wasn't in EU and it was source of pesticides for nearby EU countries, now they are probably coming from Serbia and Bosnia, while homegrown vegetables are not controlled and just sold on markets.

Same goes for homegrown vegetables in Hungary, Slovenia and Italy. If you personally know the seller, go for it, their vegetables are surely better by taste then hydroponically grown in greenhouses, but I wouldn't take risks by random seller.

Now for the "Adriatic islands" (and coastal region overall) vegetables, they have very poor soil, not a lot of it and also the rain is scarce, so any improvements for larger harvest are very welcomed to the locals (that are barely able to supply themself, not million tourists flocking to the country each year) and I would imagine the risk is even higher there.

I don't want to say, that this is a general behavior, but without any effective control, there is just no way to know.

Europol as source, not some tourist influencers or fake news site:

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/hit-...

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/2-04...

Absolutely, I know someone, who knows someone doing exactly what you described. EU has been eating a lot of “locally grown” garlic actually grown in China and other similar things.

This is something else (faking country of origin, basically a very common scam) and actually not an issue in regards to toxicity as you cant import the china garlic into EU without checking it for forbidden chemicals. It is not locally grown, but it is not harmful as you couldn't import it in this case.

Similar scam is getting a fish or squid in local Adriatic coast restaurants, where in most cases you are getting frozen fish/squid from Asia. There is barely any restaurant serving local fish (and they will lie about origin and mask the taste with excessive amounts of garlic), as most of local fish harvest is being sold immediately in the morning to fish markets internally, to Zagreb and Ljubljana. Barely any fish stays in coastal region as capital cities users are able to pay much more for it. While you will pay dearly for restaurants that are actually able to get a grasp on fresh local Adriatic fish, you can forget about 20 euros bills, and rather add another 0.

Or "home made" virgin olive oil mixed with olive oil from cheaper countries or even ordinary oil. Most of tourists will never be able to figure it out. Another thing that shouldn't be bought from someone you dont know personally.

The warning I have posted is about poisoning the locally grown and uncontrolled vegetables with forbidden pesticides bought on black market.

Btw, it is a rarely known fact that the cacao was really bad regarding the pesticide content before the EU took a hit on cacao producers and they needed to adapt to be able to sell on EU market. Now the whole world is eating much more healthy chocolate. :)

And it is continuing, no deforestation etc.: https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/cocoa/buyer-requiremen...

> actually not an issue in regards to toxicity as you cant import the china garlic

Well, import they did from what I heard. It was more of a smuggling operation than. The key was to smuggle small batches at a time and go through certain crossings where the officials are bribed. Then in EU it was presented as “locally” grown. But I definitely agree, buying produce at a local market you can’t always be sure. Growing stuff is hard and buying cheap stuff is too tempting. So some farmers found a “way”. Some more shady than others.

I lived further inland, in the rural areas west of Osijek. My family still to this day grow their own vegetables. And they share vegetables among the villagers. So if you have too much paprika, you give to others, they have too much cabbage, they give to you. It's amazing for a city dweller like me to re-visit that world.

And my family near the coast grows olives. Every summer in Croatia there is this constant bartering of olive oil, rakija, vegetables, wine, back and forth between your visits with various family members. You can't leave one place without having some in your car's boot.

Oh my. Everyone who cares about tomatoes grows their own, supermarkets are for the rest. They are not demanding and will grow anywhere there's sun, including in pot on balcony.

Why is capitalism failing us here? Why do we need to grow our own?

Capitalism gives you perfectly uniform porno-tomatoes and watered ketchupy tomato sauce. No surprise, capitalism extract profits on all ends - production, storage, and distribution and it doesn't result with tasty aromatic tomatoes.

Capitalism would absolutely love to give you delicious and peak-quality tomatoes. If consumers were willing to pay the additional cost needed to harvest and handle more heirloom-variety tomatoes, there would be a huge incentive to provide them.

If people aren't willing to pay the premium needed, then the revealed preference is for the easily harvestable varieties. Farmers markets and local producers that sell to fewer people who will pay that premium are likewise capitalism's answer to this problem (i.e. saying "Industrial agriculture can't meet the consumers' needs, but local farmers can.")

Capitalism need not be industrial-scale, it just needs to fill consumer demand somehow (which is why small business are so crucial)

Capitalism gives me options. I can get expensive tasty locally grown tomatoes when in season, if I want, while still being able to get really cheap tomatoes at any time of the year.

Because it is capitalism. Really good tomatoes are at their best for a few days only which makes them hell to transport. That's why modern tomatoes are bred for color ans size, but inside they are actually green with very hard core and very little natural sugar.

Why can I buy fresh fish and seafood, but not fresh tomatoes?

Simple: quality tomatoes are hard to transport and they don’t last when on the shelf. The closest thing to a “real” farm tomato you can buy at a reasonable price is “Kumato” from Trader Joe’s. It’s a pale imitation of a real tomato picked off the plant when it’s ripe, but at least it reminds me of it, whereas a “regular” store bought tomato doesn’t taste anything like the real thing.

Letting a tomato go fully ripe on the plant is an easy way to attract birds and lose a substantial amount of the crop. There’s no reason for it either. Once the tomato reaches the breaker stage (starting to change colour) it is internally cut off from the mother plant and will not be adversely affected by being harvested.

If we’re talking the peak flavor tomato that “capitalism” purportedly can’t produce, that is only available when you pick it from the vine, already ripe. It is true that tomatoes will ripen if picked “brown”, but they’re less flavorful than vine ripened. Source: picked a few tons of tomatoes every summer as a kid.

Source: anecdotal

Anecdotal is when someone else told you something and you used that data without verifying. The correct term in this case is “empirical”.

No, that would be hearsay.

Anecdotal is when an anecdote is used.

No I’m talking the flavour of the tomatoes from my back yard, some of which I picked brown and others I picked fully red. They tasted identical once ripened indoors. But you don’t need to take my word for it. Google tomato breaker stage.

The difference between store bought tomatoes and home grown is the cultivar. Mine are heirloom tomatoes. They’re much uglier and softer than store bought beefsteak tomatoes, but way tastier. There’s no way these would ever ship because they turn ripe for a few days and then turn to mush. They also bruise incredibly easily.

Like all free market failures, the culprit is regulation. Regulated food, local and weekend markets reduced competition by discouraging and removing small retailers until large supermarket chains remained de facto monopolies.

Those chains must serve very large number of customers so they must focus on produce that is easy to pick, store and sell. Looks good and survives (even gets ripe during) transit. Taste is often secondary.

You wanna fight that? Fight all regulations for small and local producers, even if it sounds like it’s well intended (hygiene, quality standards, subventions). Talk to your representative about it too. Finally, buy local and from smallest producer you can find.

You seriously think that small shops would be competitive if there were no subsidies? No hygiene I could maybe buy, but it goes hand in hand with quality, and there is practically no regulation for that: it's self imposed by the consumer picking pretty produce.

The consumer learns very quickly what they like. Eat a good tomato, you’ll look for one next time. The local fruit shop was even a joke in Seinfeld, I believe.

The closing of the small grocery store and producer can be mostly attributed to regulation.

No. They can be attributed to not being able to compete against big chains despite heavy regulation in favor of small businesses.

Big chains can offer what the average consumer wants in greater variety and cheaper, at more places and longer hours. They can gauge prices, do better marketing, have better stock, and wage price wars. They have more power, and what's the purpose of that if not abusing it?

Less regulation would just mean even worse food and less small shops.

Chains have whole departments dedicated to compliance. They chew through any new regulation you throw at them.

I get my groceries from a tiny neighbor market here in Eastern Europe. Usually from women of surrounding villages. Their main worries are in this order: raising market space fees (these go to the city) and new checks and rules they need to follow.

While I think there may be something to that, I think there's a simpler, more "it's just normal capitalism" explanation:

Making deals with every local small-time producer would be a big pain. Why do that when you can make a single deal with a giant monster of a tomato producer, and sell their tomatoes (especially since as the sibling comment points out, local tomatoes won't be as pretty and as uniform in quality)? There's economies of scale, prices are lower, the supply chain will be simpler, it's all better for the supermarket chain.

Small grocery shops can and will deal with small producers. The fact we are losing both in favor of giant chains is largely due to regulation and subsidies.

Otherwise we’d have plenty of boutique retailers and producers charging more for better quality produce optimized for different factors.

I don't understand what is regulated here, so that it prevents small sellers from being competitive. Is it packaging?

He is complaining about grading of fruit, so that the buyer doesn't have to inspect every single delivery but can instead order X fruit, grade Y, and it will conform to standard.

Nonsense. Like many market failures it is about consumers facing decisions but lack good information to make their purchase decision or need to optimize over too many competing product parameters.

For supermarket produce there isn't a good way to judge product quality before buying. There is some quality improvement with paying more but usually the improvement is very little compared to the price increment. For instance, a supermarket might sell tomatos at 2.99 for regular tomatos and 4.99 for a premium/organic variety. The taste will only marginally differ so that only few people buy premium. This prevents economies of scale for the better product to drive down the price.

Very little about this is about regulation.

Because economy alone can't solve all our problems? Someone probably promised you it will, but that's scam.

Because market forces, of course, and they look like this: https://newsroom.nmsu.edu/news/nmsu-developing-perfect-green...

A chile pepper optimized for mechanical harvest, because right now the fruit needs to be cut from the stem, but if you can shake it off you can spare yourself the farmworker.

Do you not have a farmer's market near you? Good tomatoes are available if you want them, and they are in season.

Capitalism has given us the most "efficient" tomato for the market. If you want to optimize for something else, you're trying to solve a different problem.

It's not, at least not where I live, in Switzerland. There are many different varieties to choose from in the supermarket nowadays, from cheap and tasteless to more expensive and tasty. It's the same in the Netherlands by the way.

The problem is not capitalism, it is the preference of the consumers in your area.

One thing to look for are local farms that have subscription services. Some give you a box of seasonal veggies each month, which will be very fresh.

I’ve not been myself but I’ve heard that in Japan it’s common to give fruit as a gift and that as a result there’s very high end fruit available for purchase. You can go into a store and spend the equivalent of $50 on the best looking and tasting melon you’ve ever had.

> Why is capitalism failing us here?

It can't even bring housing and healthcare for all, tasty tomatoes is way down the list lmao

Capitalism isn't the reason your housing costs so much; that's because of crappy government regulations (i.e. Euclidean zoning) and NIMBYs. Remove the regulations and let landowners do what they want with land and it'll be fixed; that's how it works here in Japan.

Conversely, the reason American healthcare is such a disaster is because of really bad regulation. Developed nations have shown that good healthcare systems require strong regulation, but not shitty regulation like the US has.

The world isn't the USA, yet the housing problem is impacting most of the west

It definitely is more than partially brought by capitalism and what comes with it: greed, speculation, &c.

The flat I'm renting right now in Germany is owned by a company who owns 200k flats, the main shareholder in this company is Black Rock. Now explain to me why my german salary paying a german rent benefits private shareholders in NYC ? Rent doubled in ten years...

>Now explain to me why my german salary paying a german rent benefits private shareholders in NYC ? Rent doubled in ten years...

It's simple supply and demand. Your city doesn't allow building many more units even though demand is high and growing; this greatly increases property values, and creates a potential for big profits for investors. A company of private shareholders in NYC sees this investment opportunity and buys properties up so they can reap the profits. You probably also have some relatively weak tenant legal protections, making it easy to raise rents.

If you don't like it, your city should allow more construction. But western cities don't want to do that, because of NIMBYs, "neighborhood character", shitty zoning laws, etc., so we get what we're seeing here.

> '...the reason American healthcare is such a disaster...'

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation making our health systems a disaster?

Oh man ... next up is growing your own pizza, fugget about it (>the supermarket)! Even with no sun!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060621

>Why the Wisconsin pizza farm movement is an idea whose time has come

(UPDATE: sorry to the Croatians being overrun by tourists.. guys .. Croatian food is so-so ;)

tomatoes, olive oil, cheese, it's nice to be reminded that Croatians (and their Yugoslav brothers, secretly,) gave the middle finger to Stalin et al

https://www.quora.com/Did-pizza-exist-in-the-Soviet-Union

TBH as I age and have eaten a fair share of pizza, I prefer no pizza than bad pizza.

Reminder that it's still not quite known why the Soviet Union stopped the quite planned invasion of Yugoslavia.

I think I want to finally do this. I _can_ find excellent tomatoes around here (France), but they are 27 euro/kg, more than beef.

Buy a cheap flight to south Italy and gorge yourself.

>> They are not demanding

I have to disagree on this one. They are prone to a myriad of diseases, mainly fungus: Phytophthora infenstans, Fulvia fulva, Botrytis cinerea, Mosaic Virus, Stolbur disease, and if you don't spray them with the right substances you'll lose a substantial part if not the whole crop, oftentimes lose it even if you spray them.

Other than that I agree that home grown tomatoes are better. Of course you mustn't be stupid and buy some supermarket seeds, those are awful. Use local varieties, several of them as there are subtle differences in taste and flavor. Like "oxheart" for instance: https://gomagcdn.ro/domains2/planteieftine.ro/files/product/...

Although I can buy local varieties from the grocery market and I do, they might not be just as good as a fresh one from the garden. Part of the reason is the difficulty in storing them, if you stack them one over another they will get crushed and you won't sell crushed tomatoes to the customers. So farmers tend to pick them when they aren't fully ripe and I freaking hate unripe tomatoes. Still they tend to be way better than supermarket "plastic tomatoes" offering.

One tip, pick the smaller tomatoes, they tend to be sweeter. Or at least that's what I noticed.

I lost some crops myself but tomatoes still fared better than other vegetables. It's not like some enormous investment? Having homegrown tomatoes every other year is better than nothing. If you have kids, it's a good lesson about difficulty of obtaining food from nature.

I had success with mycorrhizal "good" fungi (brand Symbivit), they were keeping bad fungi away with visible difference between treated and untreated plants.

Well it's depressing. My mother has a fairly large garden (some 1500 sqare meters) and takes quite some amount of labor to tend to it. So you work all spring and early summer only to see the crops wither away... makes you go on depression pills or just abandon the whole darn thing and buy Duch imported plastic vegetables.

A bit unrelated, nowadays my mother was telling me a memory from her teenage years in the 60s. In early summer she'd come home for the weekend from boarding school in the city and her mother (my grandma) would greet her with lunch and a salad made from fresh cucumber and onion (add salt, oil and vinegar). It would be too early for tomatoes but she still remembers the taste of that early salad.

1500sqm is absolutely not needed for occasional nutritional enrichment. That's why I mentioned pot on balcony. But yes, being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars.

>> being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars

Heh, brings back trauma memories :) But I guess it's countryside vs city life. I see my city-boy kid and his friends, bored, staring at screens whenever they can and generally having a hard time figuring out what to do with their free time. Having grown in the countryside, the answer to that was easy "tend to the crops". It's not backbreaking work but can take huge chunks of your time and it's not exactly enjoyable, I mean I'd definitely have done something else, even staring at a wall but that wasn't an option. And it wasn't just me of course, everyone I knew was doing that. I recall with some amusement a friend of mine, in the context of summer vacation (hence lots of crop tending to do), exclaiming at some point "man, I can't wait for the school to start so I can get some relaxation".

This year I grew cucumbers on my balcony for the first time, and they were surprisingly low-effort. You do need to pollinate them, if you're too high for bees, or other insects. That aside I just watered them twice a day, except on days I forgot, and hoped for the best.

Tomatoes are a bit hit and miss for me, hence trying something new this year. Usually I just grow strawberries and tomatoes at home. Other stuff gets grown on a 10m x 10mx patch of land nearby.

I recall cucumbers are also prone to diseases but perhaps not as sensitive as tomatoes. One thing, if you don't water them diligently, they will grow bitter. Like quinine-level bitterness, enjoy eating them like that! :)

I think maybe this is only a big problem in climates that are on the cold side for tomatoes. The only problem I've had the last few years is tomato blight during one particularly rainy spring, and growing the tomatoes up a trellis and cutting away the excess lower leaves has been sufficient to control it.

Companion planting aromatics may help control pests as well - I usually plant as many of basil, rosemary, parsley, and cilantro as will take in the vicinity of the tomatoes.

How hot does it get where you live?

In Texas no one I know has ever had their tomatoes survive into August. Blight and the heat kill the plants usually by mid July. You can plant new ones around this time for a fall harvest if you want, but most home gardeners I talk to are pretty burnt out by this time of the season. The heat contributes to that too I'm sure :-)

Probably not as hot as Texas. Rarely goes above 105 F in summer here. Tomatoes seem to do ok at that temperature as long as I irrigate (drip irrigation at ground level specifically - tomato plants don't like getting their leaves wet)

Croatia has horrible food, locals can not afford quality food. This country was overrun by tourists, and is now more expensive than Italy. Recent adoption of Euro was the last nail in a coffin. Go to Greece, if you want "authentic local tomato from street-market".

Just had a week on various Croatian islands. It’s true that we were shocked by the cost of the food (€18 for a pizza in a restaurant) although put it down to the cost of importing the various ingredients. I wouldn’t say any of the food was “horrible” though. We had a tremendous “meat plate” of grilled marinated chicken, pork and steak with potatoes.

(Croat lounging on the Croatian coast right now)

No, prices are high because they've been jacked up as high as the market will bear. As an example, an cup of coffee at a beach bar in a random coastal village (€2.5) is about the same as in the (touristy) center of London (£2).

The effects will probably be seen the next year.

As other commenters noted, Croatia has historically been mass budget tourism location, largely undiscovered by comparatively wealthier western tourists (aside from Germans). Ultra-low taxes for "mom and pop" short-term rentals exacerbated the mass low-quality buildout.

Now it's at a point where prices went up fast (due to euro, overall inflation and the tourist demographics changes), but the quality didn't catch up yet (generalizing a lot here).

There's also been more vocal "anti tourist" sentiment (echoing protests in Barcelona, but just people complaining on blogs and in news) that will for sure get more momentum in the next few years.

While I agree that the prices (of everything) went up, it wasn't due to adoption of euro. The grocery prices dramatically rised in the year before euro adoption due to inflation and then continued to rise after that.

Also I do find it kind of funny when tourists are complaining about prices of food in touristy places. I've eaten a hamburger in Chicago which was $15 and food prices (restaurants etc) are comparatively much higher then in Croatia.

At the same time, the prices in the grocery stores are completely out of control due to high taxes and makes living on the coast or islands as a local miserable and very expensive. Needless to say that housing is also totally out of wack, Croatia is not going in a good direction for it's own citizens.

    The effects will probably be seen the next year.

People say this every year and yet, it's always the same - the beaches get more crowded, the prices are higher, there seems to be no end to this.

£3.50 more likely for central London, Edinburgh or any fashionable tourist place.

>more expensive than italy

Related: had some friends down from a northern country and they were as amazed at the taste and cost of the tomatoes, as they were at the fact they came from the country my guests came from.

We figured from growth to packing to transportation to purchase, made the tomatoes 'just right' on the day we got them. Not had anything similar since for taste, including those i bought last night.

I imagine these were Dutch tomatoes—I’ve heard the best ones don’t actually get sold in the Netherlands, as the Dutch consumers don’t care enough to pay a premium. These get exported to the south instead, where the costumers are more discerning.

Croatia is having its "bully" tourism phase. They have been historically super cheap and undiscovered location up until 5-10 years ago and now that they are in EU and Schengen and it's actually nicer than some bigger mediterranean countries everyone started piling in. The locals which aren't really business savvy started doubling/tripling prices to see how far it can go without providing additional services or raising the quality to another level. From business perspective it does make actual sense since last few seasons after corona have been breaking records every year. Until there are actual consequences for raising per night booking prices from 100€ to 200€ from year to year nothing will change. I think that the reality is that people "in the know" like polish/chech families are being priced out because traditionally they didn't have as many western european tourists like Dutch or French and now it's on their radar

> think that the reality is that people "in the know" like polish/chech families are being priced out

Not really. They are not poor anymore, and can afford it. But quality is just not there compared to Italy, Greece, Egypt...

Only benefit for Polish and Czech tourist, they understand local language.

I would be wary with "Slavic familiarity" while visiting. Slavs in Balkans furiously hate each other. It's safer to speak German or English.

Right, but that was mostly the issue of all the former Yugoslavia nations.

Czechs 1) were not a part of Yugoslavia 2) have a long tradition of visiting the Adriatic sea.

    They are not poor anymore, and can afford it.

The price increase in Croatia in the last few years is insane, especially near the tourist spots (= seaside). Czech people who want to save some money now usually turn to the other Balkan countries that are still quite cheap.

Last time I visited Croatia the summer two years before adopting EUR and all hospitality services wanted EUR. When I requested prices in kuna they were dismissive with "just convert from EUR to kuna in Google". I could easily spend less money while in Italy, Spain, or Greece. They aspire to place themselves as Switzerland of Adriatic, mostly for Germanic speaking tourists. Who wouldn't want to charge Swiss prices, duh. I say good luck Croats!

Yeah, Euro was widely accepted even before the country switched to it. But the prices were much lower.

> Croatia has horrible food

Anthony Bourdain disagreed[1]:

> This is world class food, this is world class wine, this is world class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia.

This was in 2012, before Croatia joined the EU, but the culture of quality cuisine doesn't change in a decade.

I can't speak about the prices, but I'm sure there are affordable restaurants and markets outside of touristy zones. Go to any popular place in the world, Greece included, and you'll pay the tourist tax.

[1]: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8h8rqf

There is a lot of quality perhaps. But two things I noticed about Croatia (and maybe wider Europe) food:

1) They don't know coffee. There is no equivalent of the American half&half creamer.

2) I find that there is not that much in the way of vegetables when eating out. I wonder if perhaps it's a cultural thing where you give your guest the best, i.e. most caloric/tasty food possible. The tavern/grill places are especially like this.

This! You can have vegetables with your steak/cevapi/pljeskavica/whatever, but they will be drenched in oil and fried. ;)

Just get fiber trough ajvar, problem solved

> American half&half creamer

You are joking, right? (The country that invented Starbucks might commit more serious crimes eventually. It turns out they already have.)

Starbucks coffee is an abomination too, don't get me wrong. But I do miss the half&half and could not find a substitute; I was kinda surprised because there was a great variety of milks, heavy/whipping/cooking creams as well as all sorts of non-dairy creamers both in powder and liquid form.

> I find that there is not that much in the way of vegetables when eating out

Here in (northern) Spain is pretty much the same. Outstanding meats, cheeses, wine, etc. but you'll be lucky to set your eyes on a salad, and the only actual vegetable on most menus is grilled peppers.

I do forewarn vegetarian friends before they come to visit, but in general I don't think "light on veggies" translates to "bad". Most European nations have gone through low veggie diets at various times.

You state because you couldn't find your prefered way of coffee you think your visited country (and maybe a while continent) doesn't know coffee?

Romanian giant tomato. Buy seeds for US$3.99.[1]

This would be a good project for the Open Source Farming Robot. Assuming you actually want a kilogram sized tomato.

[1] https://www.davesseed.com/product/romanian-giant-tomato/

Looks like that particular supplier is in Tasmania and only ships to Australia!

It's a variety of beefsteak tomato, and those are widely available. At WalMart, even.[1] They're unusual, but not rare.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Beefsteak-Tomato-Plants-Two-Live-...

The thing about tomatoes is they always taste and smell a lot better when fresh off the vine than they do when they've been picked when under-ripe in order to spend a few weeks in storage and transport before they got to you.

I think this applies, more or less, wherever you are in the world and no matter what variety of tomato. One of the reasons why they're such a popular thing to grow in your own home garden.

I live in Serbia, which shares some history and traditions with Croatia, including great local food. I buy my fruits and veggies at the local market and in a couple of specialized shops and can't get enough every time, especially for raspberries and blackberries. We also have large pink tomatoes, which are just marvelous.

If Dutch tomato’s are all you can buy fresh, then try canned tomatos from Italy (eg San Marzano) to get actual flavor.

This spring (2 months before strawberry season), I bought a pack of strawberries in a supermarket. They had a good strawberry smell, some liquid (I thought it was condensate), but when I tried them at home, were like rubber inside -- absolutely tasteless. Seems these rubber strawberries were poured with strawberry syrup!!!! I let my wife try them, to feel the absurdity, and threw the rest in the trash bin.

I'm lucky to have a big marketplace in walkable distance.

My friend lived in Saint Petersburg, then moved to Yerevan (Armenia) and then to Prague (Czech rep). In Yerevan, in contrast to the other two cities, there are vegetable markets, and they have a taste. In SPb and Prague, they're like made of rubber.

Almost bring tears to my eyes !

It probably would, if I haven't started to grow my own tomatoes in the last 2 years.

I wonder how many young people never tasted real tomatoes ? What you can buy in the supermarket has pretty much no taste. And that's in Europe. In US, you have absolutely 0 taste at all. No wonder you guys put sugar and artificial flavors in everything.

I know it's hard to believe for somebody who never tasted 'the real stuff', but few things can beat a good bread, still a bit warm, with butter, salt and fresh tomatoes from a garden.

Oh how I emphasize with this story, it too reminds me of my childhood.

When I was a child my grandmother grew tomatoes that were truly delicious. She used to pick them just at the right time when they were ripe-red and lusciously sweet on the outside but just retained a hint of green on the inside. This gave them a slightly acidic edge that one just doesn't get with over-ripe tomatoes or ones that are ripened slowly. I'd add that the ideal ripening also requires good sunshine.

Her tomatoes just spoiled me forever, I've never been satisfied with tomatoes purchased in shops, whilst some are just OK most commercial tomatoes are tasteless compared with ones that are freshly picked at their optimal ripeness.

It seems to me there's no ideal solution when it comes to commercially distributed tomatoes, they have to be picked before they're at optimal ripeness for efficient transport and distribution and it's just fact that tomatoes just don't ripen off the vine to give them that luscious taste of vine-ripened ones.

Frankly, I find some canned tomatoes better than ones that one buys in shops, they definitely can have more flavor. Canned tomatoes like those from Italian canning companies such as Mutti retain flavor because they are picked at just the right time then canned immediately. That this is noticeable even after the canning process shows just how critical it is to pick tomatoes at their optimal ripeness.

These days I get most of my tomatoes in the form of small cherry tomatoes, they at least retain some of their flavor after the distribution process.

ah, the tomato supremacy chauvinism prevalent in Europe. Deeply rooted in all countries south the Alps. It is one of the last bastions standing hindering true unification.

I have faced it so many times. It goes like this:

- be from north of Alps, e.g. Germany

- be on visit in south of Alps, e.g. country bordering Mediterranean Sea such as Spain

- order dish containing tomato

- unasked, get lectured by local acquaintance how "your" country's produce tastes trash and that you don't know how heavenly "their's" is.

Since the tomato (though not our modern varieties) first evolved in Mexico, isn't there some sense in the idea that it would grow better in hotter countries?

(I'm sure that's not the only factor to which the "our tomatoes are best" advocates would attribute their tomatoes' quality.)

Yeah, tomatoes need a shit ton of sun to really grow well. Although greenhouses help a lot (which is how the Dutch do so well in this market).

Tomatoes also need a bunch of water, of course, which makes them a delicate balancing act in the more southerly (and steadily more drought stricken) regions of Europe

Joe Cocker spent the final years of his life growing heirloom tomatoes.

https://www.denverpost.com/2015/02/24/joe-cockers-crawford-e...

I am American, but living in Japan - the tomatoes here are nothing like the ones pictured but they taste so much better than anything I ever had growing up, enough that chilled tomatoes with salt on the side is a common appetizer in many izakayas. I didn't realize that tomatoes could be so tasty on their own until I left.

It’s not just Croatia. Local food is fresh from the sun and ground. Go to your farmers’ market. Meet your farmer. Sign up for a farm box and get it every week. You’ll eat better, live healthier, connect with your community. Oh and it’s cheaper and your money goes directly to the people who deserve it.

I live in a suburb that used to be all farms. By some miracle, a single one survived and still operates, so I get fresh corn, tomatoes, and a few other things all summer long that is grown a mile away.

If it ever goes, I’ll be beside myself. It’s an invaluable, irreplaceable resource.

Here in Montenegro I go to a nearby green market, “zelena pijaca” in our language, and similar stuff is usually available. Often more expensive than the ones from Netherlands but still, commercially available without black market.

However, availability of the good stuff depends heavily on the time of the year.

It's been a long lasting peeve of mine. I Live in London, where you can easily satisfy every kink, even the most exotic fruits and spices are found in every corner of the city.

Yet, for the love of me, I cannot find any tasty tomato. Even if money is no issue, it just doesn't seem to exist? A giant void in a huge market? At this point, I'd pay 10x prices without blinking.

It's fair that I cannot find them in winter, but even now, the heart of summer when they are the best, I cannot find any remotely resembling the ones found in big quantities in random Balkan supermarkets.

How is it not a thing? Did Isle of Wight crush the market? Is it just me and there is no market?

I find pretty much all fruit and vegetables to be rubbish in Scotland. The only exception is the couple of things grown here. Which is baffling given if you fly for couple of hours you can get fantastic produce everywhere.

You need sun and local intensive agriculture to grow them well. They taste better the more hot and stressed they are. It's just not something available in the UK?

Most Polish and Romanian shops sell tomatoes, but their prices are not capped at £2/kg like Sainsbury's do.

If anyone here is into these kinds of tomatoes, and is around the region - there’ll be a tomatoe fest and a tasting competition in the north of Portugal.

https://www.facebook.com/TomateDouro

I live near Lisbon and the tasty tomatoes from my childhood are now completely gone. Anything you can buy in any supermarket is absolute garbage, so much so that I only ever use prepackaged chopped tomatoes these days (those still taste decent).

One of these days I should get in my car and drive all the way to the Douro just to fetch a bunch of tomatoes, I guess.

Send me your address. I’ll ship you some. I see these tomatoes at normal fruterias quite often as well.

When I was a teen I had a tomatoe at a friend's house on the island of Krk. I was having breakfast with his family and his mother served giant, ripe tomatoes from their garden.

Those were the best tomatoes I have ever had, by a giant margin.

If you would make me eat only one vegetable all my life, it would be the tomato.

Tomato is a fruit

Vegetables don't exist: https://doodlewash.com/vegetables-dont-exist/

I remember the real tomatoes, they were larger and juicier, but lasted much less.

FTA: “ I will not make salsa because it is a sin to cook them”

Errr, umm, what? Yes, there is a category of cooked salsas, but 99% of the salsa I’ve ever had that didn’t come from a jar wasn’t cooked. I don’t recall ever getting a cooked tomato salsa in a Mexican, Mexi-Cali, or any other southwest restaurant.

Do Europeans really cook all their salsa???

Also, salsa is one of the 3 greatest destinies a delicious tomato could aspire to.

just grows your own

get high off your own supply

For those in the audience that have only ever eaten supermarket tomatoes, I'm sorry to say you've probably never really eaten a tomato.

I live in a small, agricultural country and the article resonated. Over the last 10 years supermarkets and imported vegetables have become a much more important part of our national diet.

It's such an important staple food. Historically very cheap (because widely grown) wildly diverse, and rich in flavour and nutrients. I love our _real_ tomatoes. Traditionally served in a simple salad with cucumber, salt and herbs, but so good you can just cut them up, leave them in the sun for an hour, and devour.

Supermarket tomatoes are a blight upon humanity: much higher in cost (where I live), devoid of taste, and available in only a handful of varieties. I dread the slow march of progress through our table.

It's not really the tomatoes, it's that they are harvested green and then artificially ripened when they are ready to be sold. This allows much longer shelf life but the texture of the flesh and the flavors never fully develop.

Of course different varieties have different flavors but even a standard supermarket "beefsteak" will taste so much better picked ripe off the vine than bought at the store where it has been in a cooler for two months.

As far as I understand, greenhouse tomatoes, such as those from the Netherlands, lack flavour which the sun gives. Best tomatoes I ever had were In Cádiz in south of Spain, they were from the nearby town of Conil and had so much fullness and deliciousness, the plate was offered only as tomatoes and olive oil and we were satisfied. If you're in the area, ask for these tomatoes by name and you'll not be disappointed.

In Mexico I've seen hectares and hectares of tomatoes left to rot on the vine because the price fell so low it wasn't worth to pick them. I'm still mourning all that unmade pizza sauce.

It’s also the tomato itself which is bred to resist bruising so that it looks pretty on the super market display. Unfortunately those cultivars also taste like meh.

Tastier tomatoes with thinner skins bruise more easily. They also require more labor intensive picking by hand vs bulk via machine.

Lookup the Rutgers tomato. Its a delicious one that at one point was the most popular tomato in all of the USA. It was bred for flavor, not shelf life! It fell out of favor when factory farming took over as it cannot be harvested by machine without bruising.

I have ran into this with meats as well. I had never had shrimp until I got some fresh in Baltimore. I had never eaten beef until I had some freshly butchered in Garden City, KS.

A quote I heard from some movie that released recently was..."the one thing to remember if you travel into the past is that everything is going to taste better."

The cost of modernization has been a net decrease in quality of foods across the board. "Real" foods (and many other products) are actually incredibly expensive. We don't count this along with inflation, but we should.

I get most of my meat from a local livestock farm. While I love the pork, and generally prefer the beef (took a while to get used to the more natural grass fed flavor), the thing that was real eye opening was the poultry. The chicken & turkey I get from them tastes ... well, it actually tastes like something.

Best beef isn’t fresh actually, it is aged for several weeks.

Similar with a lot of fish like tuna.

Sometimes it’s not about as fresh as possible, but how it is grown and processed.

Without meaning to be critical, but just to expand the conversation a bit, what does the word "beef" mean in your comment?

Let's broaden the scope, and consider lean and fatty versions of say "grass fed beef" vs. "industrial beef".

The word "fatty" here is just a placeholder for "less than 85% lean" ("lean" is problematical, as is "fatty", too). (How those map to "tough" and "tender" is related but of course the skill of the cook now matters too).

I would rank flavor and texture of those 4 choices this way:

freshly slaughtered as grassfed fatty > industrial fatty > grassfed lean > industrial lean.

Now add in "aged for several weeks" or how about a carefully managed 4 weeks (not that hard). The ranking changes slightly, but for all 4 the result is remarkably superior in flavor.

I've recently eaten on a sailing school boat in the Golfo de California slices of a trashier tuna than bluefin caught about 30 minutes before, and it was outstanding. Almost all US grocery stores will sell you a right proper many day aged raw tuna, and they suck. Of course it's correct that you can go to that market in JP and get a counter example.

Thanks for details.

I would also mention in Chinese cuisine, fresh lean beef (flank) is preferred for stirfry, fatty beef is preferred for boiling (hot pot).

American culture: aged is key to the complex flavours.

For fish, Japanese sushi often uses aged fish, while steamed fish should be as fresh as possible.

Basically any inland fish you buy is going to be flash frozen- you might as well defrost it yourself.

As someone who lives 30 minutes from Garden City, KS and butchers their own beef and pork, I have some notes.

1. There is a big difference in how between how packing plants process beef and how small butcher shops do it. Carefully processed beef that's not aged is better than aged stuff from the packing plant, especially ground beef. The beef that jklinger410 ate was probably both aged and carefully processed.

2. Most people who are used to grain-fed beef do not like grass-fed beef. It's an acquired taste, though I can definitely imagine how someone who is used to it would not like grain-fed beef at all.

> if you travel into the past is that everything is going to taste better

To a point. Go too far and you get the nonsense wild types we had to domesticate to be tasty.

People keep writing this, but the tomatoes I grew myself and those grown by friends as well as local very small scale growers haven't lived up to the hype. Presumably this just isn't a good place to grow tomatoes. But I guess Provence should be, and they weren't exactly impressive either. Maybe I'm just not that into fresh tomatoes.

Good heirloom tomatos are almost like a berry. So juicy and flavorful. There’s nothing like it. Maybe you need seeds from American growers.

It's not only home grown, you need the right seed too. I'm almost sure you didn't have one. Earlier tomato varieties are simply discontinued because of low yield, short shelf life etc.

Correct - a lot of the blander varieties have pushed their way into local seed markets. You should check out heirloom seed vendors for old style tomatoes. There are also some modern boutique hybrids that are absolutely fabulous. My favorites are Sun Sugar if you like cherry tomatoes, and "Pineapple Tomato" if you like that rich "tomato" flavor in a full-sized. (Both are also pulp-heavy, which in my opinion are a feature common to better tasting tomatoes.)

> those in the audience that have only ever eaten supermarket tomatoes, I'm sorry to say you've probably never really eaten a tomato

Plenty of supermarkets near farms or in urban cores have fresh heirloom tomatoes that put generic backyard ones to shame. Eating well doesn’t require continuous effort. Invest time in learning to source well. After that, it’s higher quality for the same amount of effort. (Of course if you’re willing to expend the effort, fresh tomatoes grown from good seed can’t be beaten.)

This may be the case in parts of America.

I had my first good tomato last year. It was a supermarket tomato, but it was a very expensive heirloom variety. Purple in color, with a wild shape a bit like those in TFA.

Definitely the best tomato I ever had, and it kinda ruined other tomatoes as I have tried (unsuccessfully) to find one of the same caliber since then. Tomato season is coming, so I might be able to find something close. Crossing fingers.

What country is that?

Georgia, the country.

Monotony really is humanity's biggest sin.

The day we rid ourselves of diversity in pursuit of perfection and efficiency we'll only have ourselves to blame.

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