Vox:
“The bottom line here with the industrial tomatoes is that tomatoes have been bred for yield, production, disease resistance,” Klee told me. “The growers are not paid for flavor — they are paid for yield. So the breeders have given them this stuff that produces a lot of fruit but that doesn’t have any flavor.”
“We are raising a whole generation of people who don’t know what a tomato is supposed to taste like.”
That’s why you see gigantic strawberries and fist-size apples on the store shelves. Since Americans like their produce big, and big fruit is more efficient to grow, growers do everything they can to supersize their fruit, even at the expense of flavor.
Anyone else noticed this? I did especially when I was in Italy. In particular, the tomatoes tasted amazing and completely different from the blandness of what we get in supermarkets here in North America.
This is why I started my garden. So much better flavor and cheaper. Funny you mention tomatoes. I won’t buy them in unless I have to. Anyone who likes them should try to grow them to taste the difference. Very easy to do in a planter.
Well, it is, unfortunately, quite obvious. US food quality (outside of beef) is the lowest I know (and so far I have travelled around 60 countries). Taste normally comes from fat, salt, sugar and tons of cheap processed cheese. Some of the fresh produce would be OK, not great, if not everything would be served too cold.
But the same trend has started here in Europe quite some time ago – it is not as bad yet, but we are getting there. You can still get good things, but the cost is enormous. A pound of Italian vine-ripened tomatoes with a bio-label (pesticide-free) almost $10…
Europe and the US are both huge though, and it varies greatly, especially from season to season. Tell me how good the tomatoes are in Germany in February. 🙂 The fact is you CAN buy good produce in the US in many places, if you’re willing to pay for it. But consumers demand food that costs less, lasts longer, bruises less, and as a consequence doesn’t taste as good – so that’s what we get. I’m not sure I buy it as a problem while the better stuff is also available, and in the meantime it’s more affordable and convenient for people in general to buy fresh produce.
I was turned around on so many foods on my honeymoon to Greece. Tomatoes most of all. They didn’t even look like the tomatoes I’d seen here in Canada.
How odd. I was in Spain and France in October. I didn’t notice anything of the kind. I wonder how much of the difference is people going to a place, filled with the anticipation of liking something better, and finding exactly what they expected (kind of a placebo effect). I simply went to Europe expecting to see interesting things. Not planning to discover that vegetables were better or worse, I didn’t notice vegetables being better or worse. (In fact, a lot of the food I had was more bland there than here in the USA) (And in Moldova and Ukraine, expecting the food to mostly be worse, I was often correct… though not always). I’ll pay more attention next time.
Remember back when Red Delicious apples tasted REALLY good and not like potatoes?
word.
Funny thing.. tomatoes originate from America (Perù) but taste better outside America 🙂
There is quite a big difference between America (North, USA) and South America (Peru) so I’m pretty sure they taste better in America than in America ^^
The fruits and vegetables are much better tasting in Canada than in U.S. also. You can’t use the catch-all of “North America” in this case. I travel back and forth between U.S. and Canada all the time and the quality of the produce in Canada is one of the first things I notice.
Not to mention bread – at least in Germany 😉
I live in the UK and our fruit suffers a similar fate. When I holiday in Turkey on the Meditteranean, the fruit is amazingly tasty. One day I was in a bar and the barman went around giving a free snack to everyone. When it was my turn I put the unknown food in my mouth and it was wonderful. “Wow!” I said, “that is delicious, what is it called?” He smiled and said “It is called ‘Pear’, and pointed to the tree over the bar, where he had just picked it.
It was the best pear I have ever tasted, and nothing like the ones I can buy from the supermarket.
I agree…
I remember reading about this issue a couple of decades back.
It’s not just that Americans like big produce. It’s that we apparently demand it all year-round, whether a specific fruit or vegetable is out of season, and therefore needs to be stored long-term or shipped long distances.
I’m trying to get out of the habit of things like tomatoes in winter. They’re just rubbish here right now.
I have completely stopped buying commercial tomatoes and strawberries. There’s a great episode of King of the Hill called “Raise the Steaks” where Hank reluctantly joins a food co-op to get good steaks. Eventually he brings home organic tomatoes and their reactions when they eat them at dinner are spot on. Luanne says “This is a tomato? I thought it was a heaven ball.”
The saddest thing in the world is an american tomato in winter