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Thanks for sharing this! I wasn’t expecting much from this article as it sounded a bit clickbaitish, but I was pleasantly surprised!
“People lost a lot of interest in tomatoes for a long time until heirlooms came back,” Walker said. “Now we have the same thing with peppers. There’s a place for people to embrace heirloom peppers, the way that we have with tomatoes.”
I never liked tomatoes in unprocessed form until my neighbor grew some for fun in my garden and gave them to me. Home tomatoes are great.
Coincidentally, I just watched this week’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and Larry goes on a similar rant about hating strawberries his whole life until he ate one right off the bush. That’s another one industry really does a disservice to!
Store produce is just so meh so often. Do people prefer pretty over tasty that much?
Appearance is part of it, but shelf-stability is HUGE. Heirloom tomatoes for instance are so delicate; even if they survive harvest and transport (challenging enough when done by hand, even more so if automated) they can easily get damaged during shelving, customer handling, checkout and bagging, transport home, placement on a counter… More often than not by the time the consumer actually goes to eat it the tomato is covered in bruises and splits (and if the injuries are more than a day old, very likely mold as well). That creates a lose-lose scenario where the customer feels ripped off because their (usually very expensive!) produce went bad before they could eat it, leading to the producers likely losing future business from said unhappy customer.
I think the article hits the nail on the head: this new line of jalapenos is great for processors and therefore will almost certainly stick around, so it’s important for other consumers to demand labeling of new vs more traditional jalapenos and the stocking of both at suppliers and grocery stores. Going back to the tomato example, I love heirlooms but still buy more recently-bred tomatoes for certain uses (e.g. a recipe I won’t be making for a few days). Plus tomatoes wouldn’t be available year-round had not varieties that handle transport and storage better been developed.
As always, for the best quality produce the ranking goes: grow it yourself > buy it direct from a farmer > buy it from a retailer that sources locally > buy it from a retailer that does not source locally.
The fragility of tomatoes is mostly why smaller tomato varieties (cherry, grape) are generally much tastier when bought retail or out of season than larger varieties. Smaller objects are sturdier than a larger object of similar shape and material.
Do people prefer pretty over tasty that much?
You can’t taste the produce, so you have to use something else to determine tastiness. As a result, produce producers (heh) try their best to compete against each other based on looks. Everything else falls to the wayside as they compete for more sales until you get to where we are today, terrible taste but impeccable looks.
It’s why Red Delicious apples are disgusting, tomatoes are flavorless, and Jalapeño Peppers aren’t spicy. Looks are the only thing to compete over at a grocery store.
I think it was Ocean Spray cranberries were on How It’s Made or another show like that where they showed their laser powered cranberry grader that would ID perfect berries at near supersonic speed and an air puff would shoot any imperfect ones off the line. That was pretty cool.
Produce samples would be nice! Could probably do that at the farmers market.
But you can smell things
I was surprised at how delicious home grown tomatoes are as well. But even if a market started offering tasty ones it’d be hard to sell, at least at first. Like “no these aren’t a new variety but we grew them for taste instead of commercialism, we promise. And btw all our other tomatoes are bland.” It’s doable but there’d be an adjustment period I think
You can develop an eye for it. Mainly you aim for ugly tomatoes with a certain shade of red. Spotty is good!
But still, tomatoes suck. You gotta hit the local places for the real deal, and even those are falling off around here.
I’m convinced that a significant fraction of people don’t really taste food.
I’ve come across a few people that seem to hate eating is a part to survival. What are they eating that they hate all food? There are so many yummy things out there!
I mean, I consider myself a foodie but the need to eat a full meal three times a day every day is just exhausting. Not just figuring out what to eat and preparing it, but even the experience of eating itself. Like, I love a good meal, but as with all things overexposure leads to boredom. I’d love it if I only needed to eat once a day and could focus on having that one meal be really good. Breakfast especially feels like such a chore; there are so many things to do in the morning I don’t really want to spare even just the 15-20 minutes needed to eat a meal (nevermind prepare it and clean up afterwards!)
I’ve gone to prepping breakfast and lunch the night before. It’s not 100% as good, but it beats cooking and cleaning as a zombie at 5am.
I’d love it if I only needed to eat once a day and could focus on having that one meal be really good.
OMAD (one meal a day) or intermittent fasting might be worth trying. There was a good while where I was restricting calories and only eating in the evenings, with a pretty decent morning gym session (60 min weight lifting + 30 min running), and it seemed to work well until COVID lockdowns messed up my routines. I was never hungry during the day unless I ate whatever random junk someone brought to the office.
I’ve not heard of OMAD but I’ve known a few people for whom IF has worked really well. Whether it’s a blood sugar thing or something else I don’t know, but skipping meals really does not work for me (migraine trigger, among other things). I’d love to switch to a lunch-and-dinner-only meal schedule, but alas.
I really think that they simply don’t or only just barely taste it. These are the people that buy Soylent and Huel, or eat McDonald’s and slather their well-done steaks in ketchup.
Growing up poor in a crappy place with no good food, it’s easy to think this way. I didn’t really enjoy any vegetables until college.
That’s fair. It’s been a while now, but we weren’t poor , both my parents were pretty crappy cooks and since everything was either dry/tough or mush, there were a lot of foods i didn’t like until many years later. If all you have is a corner store or dollar store to get stuff from, you can only do so much to it to make it something exciting.
I hate raspberries, except for the ones I found in the boundary waters growing wild. I think that is the flavor every iteration raspberry is trying to match and failing miserably.
hating strawberries his whole life until he ate one right off the bush
As a country kid, me and my cousins were worse than rabbits were on the strawberries in gardens. We’d legitimately sit down and eat every strawberry then move to the next plant. Eventually they showed us how to distinguish blackberries and they just turned us lose on the woods.
Everything is better right off the plant.
But it’s not just looks in the store, they’re breeding them for shelf life.
A garden tomato would be inedible by the time it got to your local supermarket in the middle of January.
The biggest part of gardening for food, was canning everything so you had some all year. So you have to factor in that store bought produce is fresh year round. You’re not getting that without an indoor year round garden and a lot more work.
I don’t have kids, but I have borrowed some nieces to take apple and strawberry picking and it’s fun seeing them destroy some delicious fruits!
I keep hoping vertical farming or hydroponics, etc will catch on and bring foods back closer to home. As long as we have sunny parts of the world with cheap land and labor, it won’t be viable though as a business. Maybe in a few decades…
I’ve tried container gardening a bit, as I didn’t have a yard, and while the results were meager due to my lack of farmer knowledge, they were still tasty. Can’t beat peak picking time, no matter how small the result may be!
A lot of it has to do when the produce is picked. Things that fully ripen on the plant will be better than the store bought stuff that by necessity has to be picked under-ripe, so that it will be ripe by the time it makes it to store shelves.
This is why I buy frozen produce as long as the texture isn’t critical. The hardness lets it survive shipping even though it’s ripe. Texture is destroyed though, so you can’t use it for everything.
This is why I get a farm share (CSA), so I’m supporting the local farmer. I get the freshest produce, and they get a higher price than if they’d sold to a store.
It’s a great idea for people that have that available. I’ve looked into it but the one near me the box is so big for the 2 of us I don’t think we’d ever be able to finish it!
The farm owner is a bit of a jerk, but he’s still a local jerk at least! 😝
I got together with a friend and we split our box :)
Any decent CSA that isn’t having a terrible crop-failure year is going to overload you with produce. Even if they didn’t there’s a good chance that you’ll get a boatload of one product all at once (e.g. “there’s a heat wave next week so I harvested everything this week before it bolts, hope you like brassicas”). The key to getting the most out of your CSA is canning, freezing, dehydrating, and/or fermenting the bounty while you have it and slowly enjoying it all year long! Most CSAs only last a few months anyway, so it’s a feature not a bug that they provide you with more food than you could possibly consume fresh.
The real problem is that you can’t taste test your food before you buy it, so, your only indicators are visual until after its in your house, generally.
People? No.
Mindless consumers? Yes.
Eh, consumer choice is kinda tricky.
How does one cross-shop a tomato? And if store tomatoes are all you ever had, why would you expect one to taste any different than another? One stores bland, out of season tomato tastes just like another.
Even in the case you do know the difference, there are caveats. I’m a fan of a few specific kinds of apples. Cheap, mealy apples I can find all over. The ones I actually like that I can get other than in September and October now cost about $2 per apple. That is too dang much for one apple for me to buy as much as I would like. So I’m left with buying crappy apples or no apples.
And now this makes farm stands and farmers markets trendy, so now they’re expensive too. I never expected basic foods to be one of the trickier aspects of being an adult, but here we are.
Common refrain from my perspective. No wonder kids don’t like fruit. It’s bred to survive picking and transport with minimal damage, often seedless, and have as long a shelf life as possible while looking attractive. It’s picked under-ripe by a big margin.
It tastes like shit. Pithy, flavorless, sour, etc. Some vegetables even fall into this trap. They’re big, pretty, and pithy. Dry. Hard.
It’s been a noticeable shift since I was a kid, and I was spoiled by growing up in a major fruit-growing area. Could pick up a flat of fresh strawberries for $6. Fresh melons, tree fruit, berries…all were available during the summer. Didn’t have too much cooler-climate fruit like apples though. That fruit was better than candy many times.
I’ve been making an effort to try to locate as much fruit or whatever to grow ourselves that tastes right, looks be damned. It’s a lot harder than I thought. Many of the seeds found at stores around this time of year are hybrids that often fall into the same commercial trap - big, showy, and shitty. You’ve got to go places like Seed Savers Exchange and buy the older varieties that are less fucked with.
Regarding vegetables: I don’t know where you live, but at least in the United States there are tons of online seed stores selling heirloom produce, and a growing number selling open pollinated varieties at that. There are also quite a number of hybrids that aren’t bred for industrial agriculture. I’m in a somewhat odd climate in the Pacific Northwest so I try to source seed locally because the varieties they sell often perform better here, but even then I have my choice of numerous seed companies.
Regarding fruit: agreed, fruit seeds can be really hard to source; most fruit is sold by the plant instead and variety options are extremely limited compared to vegetables (plus plant starts are so much more expensive than buying seeds, especially online because of shipping). I really hope that some of the companies doing great work in the vegetable seed field will start offering more fruit seeds, but unlike vegetables fruit tends to be perennial and more commonly utilizes complicating techniques like grafting so I don’t know how viable this hope actually is.
I can grow and vegetable I like. I know how. Most people don’t.
No experience with fruit, so you got me thinking on that bit.
I’m a pepper nut. And tomatoes are god’s perfect food. So anyway…
Yeah, I get the pepper thing. Grow 'em mild, add capsaicin to suit the intended recipe. No way to mass produce peppers and get the heat you want.
Example: I love me some super hots. One year I grew jalapenos and stuffed some fresh pods with bacon, cream cheese and sour cream. Easy eating, right? My god, even I could hardly eat more than 3. Never ever had 'em that hot, didn’t know they could be that hot. Turns out I had them grown in poor soil and starved them for water. Heysus.
Lots of great comments on tomatoes. Here’s one for y’all: Read years ago that selecting for uniform color and other cosmetic properties bred the acid and sugar out. Think on that. Tomatoes, with little acid and sugar. No wonder they’re cardboard paste. (Yanking them off the vine while green contributes of course. They’re not getting the energy to make sugar.)
I’m surprised the United States “canning authorities” haven’t had something to say about reduced acid in tomatoes. They’re so uptight when it comes to acidity levels in canning…
It seems to me that ají/dedo-de-moça is undergoing the same process here in South America. People went from “whoa, you’re adding a whole pepper!” to “…meh, add two just to be safe”.
It’s a tragedy.
I get my chiles from a Mexican grocer for exactly this reason. They’re actually a bit spicy!
Serranos from the major supermarkets are also less spicy than they should be.
Maybe my local brand is the margin of error, but this comes as a surprise to me, because my area’s Walmarts have started carrying a new suppliers’ serranos, and those suckers are even hotter than the jalapenos, which have seemed to cool down over the years as reported elsewhere.
Dicing a pepper still gives me deadly jalapeno fingers for about 2 days, so I guess I’m still getting the spicy ones.
