Why supermarket tomatoes tend to taste bland | Hacker News Reader

Why supermarket tomatoes tend to taste bland

latimes.com

63 pointsesalazar34 comments

Coming from Europe, when I was in America (CA) 3 years ago I was shocked that supermarket tomatoes just didn't have any taste; literally, they tasted like water.

When I tell my friends about this they think I surely must be exaggerating. Yeah, industrial tomatoes here in Austria don't taste like real farmers' tomatoes either, but it's not comparable to the situation in the US.

All this somehow reminds me of Soylent Green. Hope our children don't end up not knowing what real vegetables / fruits taste like.

There's definitely several grades of taste. In the U.S. I've had massive, red strawberries. They look gorgeous. But they taste like water compared to the comparatively "ugly" ones back home in Sweden.

But then I pick an orange off a tree here in Greece, and it's unlike any orange I've ever eaten. Eating an orange is like drinking a glass of freshly-squeezed juice, only there's no need to add sugar or anything. Of course, to get Oranges up to Sweden, they need to be picked early, and they get to ripen in the back of a truck...

And then we have the modern expectation of being able to get anything out-of-season, I'm sure that also causes farmers to pick breeds that grow well, but taste less.

Interesting, I've been living in Vienna for more than 7 years now and didn't notice the fruits and vegetables tasting any worse when I visited Atlanta, Georgia.

They did cost more than here in Austria tho, which surprised me (I assumed everything consumable would be cheaper in the US).

Yeah, I was overgeneralizing - what I meant were industrial Californian tomatoes. The taste is probably much better in other regions of the US.

Also it probably depends on what chain you buy them from - it wasn't Walmart but it was still some big retailer iirc. If you buy tomatoes from Hofer here they won't taste very good either (but still a lot better than the ones I had in CA).

    Yeah, I was overgeneralizing - what I meant 
    were industrial Californian tomatoes. The 
    taste is probably much better in other 
    regions of the US.

I'd actually be surprised that a rich and organic/health obsessed place like California wouldn't have much better produce than Atlanta/Georgia :)

It always amazed me how bad the supermarket produce was in California. Almost all of it is grown within 100miles of LA, even Mexico is only a couple of hours away and yet all of it was terrible factory-grade long life varieties and expensive.

That's the other weird thing for a european, the supermarkets are more expensive than the corner vegetable stores, there are no fruit/veg markets - only either farm gate trucks or fancy expensive farmers markets

Supermarket food is grown in the Central Valley, which is at least 100 miles from L.A.

Only Farmer's Market foods are grown in quantity close to L.A.

My wife and I spent some time in France last summer.

One day, we bought some celery for a recipe we were making. When we ate it, I couldn't believe the taste. "Celery has a FLAVOR?"

This was just regular supermarket celery, not from a farmers market. I'm not sure I've ever seen celery at a farmer's market in the US, actually.

I was in Europe last summer, and the tomatoes I got on sandwiches in Denmark and Germany were 100x better than the ones we get in Canada. I really don't care for tomatoes here, but I just loved them in Europe.

Maybe it's the high quality bread, meat and cheese that they use in Europe, but I'm still shocked that I had the best sandwich of my life at the hauptbahnhof in Munich.

Here in the UK, I've got two main sources of tomatoes: supermarkets, or the local once-a-week farmers' market.

At the supermarket, they tend to be packaged. At the farmers' market, they're on display loose or on the vine.

I don't buy by colour: I buy by smell. No kidding -- the tomatoes on the vine bought from the speciality farm stall smell utterly different to the supermarket variety; a pungent, 'green' scent that you can pick up by sniffing the vine. The supermarket variety, even vines of tomatoes, barely smell at all when you get them out of the packaging.

And smell is a major component of the human sense of taste, conveying many of the nuances of flavour.

Is supermarket over-packaging actually an attempt to disguise the lack of aroma of foodstuffs by forcing customers to evaluate by sight rather than by the more obviously applicable sense?

Is supermarket over-packaging actually an attempt to disguise the lack of aroma of foodstuffs by forcing customers to evaluate by sight rather than by the more obviously applicable sense?

Yeap. Speaking about tomatoes for example, organic ones never look quite red, they have a yellowish look on them.

It's one of the big problems for fancy organic type supermarkets. People associate organic=good and healthy=perfect and pretty, but in reality of course it's the opposite.

So one of the reasons fancy organic supermarket produce is so expensive is that they hand sort and pick the prettiest pieces.

>So one of the reasons fancy organic supermarket produce is so expensive is that they hand sort and pick the prettiest pieces.

Very interesting. Do you have some good sources so we can read more about it?

I think - no evidence to justify this - that you're just smelling the vine. The vine and the leaves of tomatoes smell really strong. I bet if you took one of the vine tomatoes off the vine, washed it, left it for a few hours, you wouldn't be able to smell that smell any more.

I have considered whether the leaves of tomatoes are edible, they do have such a pungent smell. I was told they are poisonous. I could google it, but would that not ruin the fun?

Just to 'ruin the fun' for you (and anyone else inspired by you), the leaves of tomatoes contain cyanide. Same with potato leaves.

Really? I thought it was an alkaloid (solanine) similar to other members of the nightshade family.

You're correct, it's solanine, not cyanide.

I asked a tomato farmer about this once, and he said that supermarkets only buy varieties that transport well without bruising; taste is secondary.

That seems too bad but ultimately reasonable, as it is the eyeballs that select the tomato, to the mouth's eventual misfortune.

People of course would prefer tasty vegetables, but I imagine that one of the most common (if not the most common) reason after pricing that people do not shop at supermarket X is that "the produce looks like shit there." If that's at all a differentiating factor, well, this is what we get.

If it is a matter of bruising then it would ultimately effect the taste as well - or at least the mouthfeel, which is arguably part of the taste if you use the tomato in a salad rather than a stew.

Perhaps the solution is simply to educate consumers better.

Barry Eastbrook has a book "Tomatoland" [1], about the taste of tomatoes in America, which is based on his earlier article [2]. Also there was a good interview with him on NPR [3]. Tomatoes are grown for easy transportation, and appearance, not for taste. They're harvested while still green, and then treated with ethylene gas, which "colors" them in an attractive color, but doesn't add any taste.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Dest...

2. http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-th...

3. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

Another problem is shipping. A lot of produce is picked before it's ripe, because unripe fruit is less easily damaged during shipping.

This is a simple reason to buy local produce: if it was picked ripe, maybe today or yesterday, it will taste better.

Merlin Mann and John Gruber had a pretty good discussion of this (and many other things) in "The Banana Window" episode of The Talk Show.

http://5by5.tv/talkshow/57

On this topic, I am sure that many tropical fruits taste so much better when you eat them in their native setting. Mangoes and papaya are the first two that come to mind. I have never had a good papaya in England or in Canada and yet, in the West Indies they are one of my favourites.

Growing tomatoes hydroponically, in greenhouses, all year round, then picking them early, and then shipping them (from Holland to US?) seems really weirdly sub optimal.

It's optimising for some metric, just not the one you care more about.

In US as in most developed countries it takes four to seven days for vegetables to reach the supermarket shelves. That's why supermarkets seek crops that can last longer while taste is less significant.

Furthermore, all fruits and vegetables taste good when they're in season. Tomatoes for example are in their prime condition from July to October.

The problem is that we've been optimizing for food that looks like it will be tasty instead of food that is actually tasty: http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-02-16.html

The real shame is that supermarket tomatoes train an entire generation to hate the taste of tomatoes. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that opt for "no tomatoes" when eating out. Tomatoes are that annoying mushy pocket of water in your burger, or that mealy texture in your sandwich. That's unfortunate because vine-ripened tomatoes are deliciously sweet and tart--there is no confusion about whether it is a fruit or vegetable.

"Suggests," "tend to!" Insultingly soft-pedaled article! Supermarket tomatoes are horrible. If left to ripen, still horrible. Is there no one left who remembers what a tomato tastes like?

"researchers have discovered one reason why: a genetic mutation, common in store-bought tomatoes"

This reason stated in the article is not the primary reason. Store tomatoes are picked hard and green so they will not be bruised during transport. They are then sprayed with nitrogen before being put out so that the skin turns orangish and looks sort of ripe. But it's not ripe, and won't ripen properly since it's a green tomato that was picked long before it was ripe.

You can grow the exact same varieties that they sell at the store and allow them to ripen and they will taste considerably better than store bought. This shows that the popular hybrid varieties are not the primary cause of the taste and texture problems.

Yes, some varieties of heritage tomatoes will taste even better, due to genetics. But the overwhelming primary issue here is the picking when completely non-ripe.

source: decades of growing tomatoes

>They are then sprayed with nitrogen before being put out so that the skin turns orangish and looks sort of ripe.

Stores spray the tomatoes with Ethelyene gas. Not Nitrogen. The difference matters here. Ethelyene gas is naturally produced by tomatoes and other fruits that ripen after picking. This gas catalyzes the ripening process. In nature, ripening happens relatively slowly because the gas is excreted into the open air. In a supermarket, this gas is given in much higher doses than would happen in nature, accelerating the ripening process. This turns the tomatoes red, but because it happens more quickly the sugars in the tomatoes don't have as much time to fully develop which is the main reason home-grown and ripened tomatoes can taste better.

However, as I explained this is still just an accelerated version of a natural process. You can do a smaller scale version by sticking your tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple (apples produce a lot of Ethelyene gas) for a couple days. The article is describing tomatoes that theoretically taste even better than home grown varieties, which still have similar genetic makeup to supermarket variety tomatoes.

ha - this was published in Science. This is serious business. You could win a McNobel in Tomatorie.

People, this is about whether tomatoes taste bland! From the article: "But the new study, published this week in Science, found that the mutation that leads to the uniform appearance of most store-bought tomatoes..."

If you don't get it, Science, like Nature, is extremely prestigious (for a general science journal) - Nobel territory. :)

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