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Comment by brikym | Hacker News Reader

> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them

Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one company have taken over the market and the berries are hard and bland. But they look nice. As each layer of the chain consolidates it forces adjacent layers to consolidate and you end up with sameness. The small strawberry companies probably went bust because the big supermarkets pushed hard. Now I have to buy my strawberries from a roadside farmer and they're great.

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In the Netherlands strawberries in the supermarket have generally good quality, and a season too, though you can buy them year-round. But there's only one type of strawberry, the red sweet ones.

A recent dopamine fracking example in the supermarket is beer culture. Couple years ago in NL small breweries were popping up everywhere and making delicious specialty varieties, or reviving long lost beers from old recipes. Also small shops emerged, collecting special beers from around the world. This did not go unnoticed at the supermarket, and the number of brands they offered exploded. Rows upon rows of the most fancy designer cans to attract your attention, highly priced but convenient. It killed off a large part of this trend. "Hey, I can just buy this in the supermarket".

First of all it's not what the article says. It doesn't mention heirloom harvest at all.

Second, after trying heirloom tomatoes myself, I stopped buying the claim that commercial cultivars are that bad.

Right but that’s not what the article argues. The article argues that strawberries have been destroyed and now you only get the synthetic flavor and no grandma nostalgia.

If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.

Other possibilities:

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from will sell good strawberries to them

"The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?

    The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries

You most definitely get this phenomenon with tomatoes. There’s little demand for actually good tomatoes, because most people don’t even know what a good tomato tastes like at this point.

This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once picked relative to other fruits I guess. So they have completely bred the flavor out of them in a quest to achieve something that looks good on a supermarket shelf.

This is a phenomenal example I hadn't even considered, because I have been affected by this kind of "invisible hand of the market" negative quality spiral.

The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.

I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its own demographic.

I see people constantly make this argument, and honestly I think it’s BS. I grew up eating tomatoes from my grandparents garden, and I’ve lived and traveled all over the world. I’ve grown tomatoes, bought them from roadside farmer stands, bought them at grocery stores, and had them in everything from hole in the wall restaurants in developing countries to Michelin three star restaurants on multiple different continents.

Today’s grocery tomatoes are fine. And my grocery stores generally have 5-10 varieties too.

Yes, you can get better ones, but not to where it’s some religious experience that will forever ruin grocery store tomatoes.

On top of that, most people really don’t care that much, not because they don’t know any better, but because the cost and convenience factor trumps the slight subjective increase in quality. I doubt most people could even tell the difference between two tomatoes of the same type and ripeness if one came from the grocery store and the other from a backyard garden.

Isn't the point that we don't grow the good varieties any longer because they don't survive freight? It doesn't matter if you bought the tomato seeds from Harrods and grew them in your lush orchard if they're the same lineage bred for shipping hardiness over all else.

Well, there's two issues really.

1. Store-bought tomatoes are nearly always bred for shippability and appearance over flavor 2. Store-bought tomatoes are picked when unripe, so they shelf-ripen during transit and at the store, which is highly inferior to ripening on the vine for flavor

For the first issue... you can buy heirloom tomato seeds at any major hardware or garden store in America.

For the second issue... even the typical tomato breeds will taste great if you grow them yourself and let them vine-ripen till they're ready to eat.

I’ll grant that most non-local tomatoes have always been bad by definition, because they’re picked while green so they don’t rot before reaching the store.

Plum tomatoes absolutely did not used to be this bad, though. They are SO mealy now. Horrible. Beefsteaks are mealier as well. Those Campari tomatoes are pretty good year-round, though, I have to admit.

This is all in the NE USA, FWIW. I don’t know the tomato situation elsewhere.

    I doubt most people could even tell the difference 
    between two tomatoes of the same type and ripeness 
    if one came from the grocery store and the other from 
    a backyard garden.

Yeah, and I would run as fast as Usain Bolt if we woke up with the same body one day.

But that kind of the thing. They would almost never be the same ripeness because outside of local tomato season the tomatoes are picked while unripe, and then they “shelf-ripen” in transit because ethylene gas etc. That’s always been an issue, of course, and hasn’t changed over time.

The other issue is breeding - the continual breeding for appearance rather than flavor. Maybe we’re all imagining that one.

The market is too busy working two jobs to afford living standards previously afforded by one income. Convenience and distribution is king now.

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