Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I am from Brazil, here our economy depends greatly on commodity exports (meat, soybeans, iron, coal, and whatnot).

Producers of commodities, tend to export the best stuff, and sell the crap internally... It has an interesting result: the flavour (or quality, for non-edible products) of some stuff, is drastically different, for example two famous cases is chicken, and oranges, it happened once to each industry to be unable to export for some reason, and they dumped the export product in the internal market, people that bought the "export" chicken and oranges were very impressed, it tasted MUCH, MUCH better, also the export oranges are obviously different (they are bigger, heavier and have a more striking colour).

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people :( (I had girlfriends that tasted those, but when it happened I lived in a city that was too small to get those products).

Still, for many people that think that produce can not be THAT different, I can say, yes, it can, even when made by the same company, sometimes in the same farm.

The tragedy is that when those exports arrive on their destination (take mangos arriving in Portugal, for instance), due to necessity to prevent the fruit to get ripe in transit they alter it somehow and not for the best.

I'm used to the taste of fresh picked mango (and guava, banana and other tropical fruits) and it is a world of difference from the fruits that we get in the supermarket. They all taste like they were picked way before they properly matured and then when they reach their destination they add some ripening substance making the fruit look ripe but without the right taste and the aroma.

It's a tragedy, they pick the best fruits, mangle them to survive travel and deprive both the locals and the foreigners of the best produce.

Even much of the domestic food you eat in the US is quite old.

The average supermarket apple in the US is over a year old.[1] According to Martin Lindstrom in "Brandwashed" it's an average of 14 months old.

Food preservation is great and allows us to eat domestic apples year-round, but taste and texture suffers immensely.

1: http://www.today.com/food/apple-you-just-bought-might-be-yea...

It's hard to see how it could be economically efficient to have a year's worth of apples in the producer's inventory. Surely they should be trying to keep the capital tied up in inventory as low as possible?

The article nostromo links seems to talk about one year being the maximum age, not the average.

Since it costs the same to ship a mediocre product as the best products, it makes sense to ship the nicest stuff since a premium can be charged for it.

Happens in the US too, for the same reasons. Our export avocados tend to be larger an nicer looking than the domestically circulated equivalents. However, they both taste the same.

That explains it! I lived in California, where all the grocery-store avocadoes were marked 'Florida'. And California is a major avocado-growing region! I suppose all their best ones ended up in Florida.

The same happens here in Florida with orange juice. Every grocery store carries many varieties of "California orange juice". Which seems silly, given that we have great oranges right here.

Same in California: I only see Florida orange juice in the supermarket.

Most definitely is, our farm is California too. If you wan't the best quality avocados go to a farmers market (esp around August).

Yes! There's actually a name for exactly this effect in economics, if anyone's interested: The Alchian Allen Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect

The same happens for American fruit & Japan. It was weird wandering around Japanese marketplaces and seeing Product of Oregon and Product of California signs on produce that were vastly superior to what I was able to buy in the US.

One thing that weirded me out about Japanese supermarkets is that the Australian beef I've found is totally inferior to any of the Australian beef I've seen in Australia. I wonder if preferences are different?

Japanese beef is a strange case. Because there is so little land, produce tends to be high quality, but very expensive. Australian beef is imported specifically to fill the "cheap beef" market, so sending the good stuff would defeat the purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com