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Comment by specproc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

What country is that?

Georgia, the country.

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