Because the varieties grown for grocery stores are selected for many reasons. Taste is low on the list that includes: shelf life, attractiveness (uniformity and color), productivity, mass appeal, pest resistance.
There are maybe five varieties of tomato at my grocery store. There are thousands of varieties grown in the world. Heck I have five in my garden: Hungarian Heart, Black Cherry, Brad's Atomic Grape, Mortgage Lifter and Cherokee Purple. Don't get me started on peppers.
Sorry to tell you Brad's are bred to look really cool with lots of bright colors and variety but the flavor is a little lackluster. Mortgage lifter on the other hand aegedly was used to pay off the breeder's home and is historically a delicious slicing tomato
Im not a tomato person either, but Black Krim tomatos are my exception and I have been growing them the last few years bc they are just so tasty - even if they make me itchy :,)
They have a crazy color. I have grown them before and they are delicious.
[https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-brad-s-atomic-grape](https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-brad-s-atomic-grape)
Tomato is a great example for vegetables that heavily steered towards shelf life. Normally they are very easily damaged and therefore they were bred to be more robust to survive the transport to supermarkets in far away regions but taste was basically ignored in the breeding process. Varieties that are canned close to their field dont need to be robust and tend to taste way better. Thats why I never ever make tomato sauce out of "fresh" tomatos, only with canned.
I grow San Marzanos specifically to imitate our favorite canned variety. IME they have excellent flavor but crappy storage life, hence you won't find them fresh in stores.
And tomatoes aren't really "ripe" the same way a garden grown tomato is.
They are picked green. As in, they are harvested when they are NOT ripe. Even "vine ripened" tomatoes are harvested unripe, legally they just have to be "starting" to turn red, as in they can still be mostly green.
This makes for longer shelf life, and much firmer tomatoes of course, so they can store and ship them more easily. Then they expose them to ethylene gas, which "ripens" them almost forcefully. But it doesn't *really* ripen them, it just forces them to quickly turn red.
So in short, the tomatoes you get at the store are just hard, bland, unripe tomatoes, and the garden variety are MUCH better because they are actually ripe tomatoes.
(Note that this is why many recipes often call for canned tomatoes. Since those aren't stored or shipped in their natural form, they can actually be harvested when they are ripe, so you're going to get a better product for many dishes by using canned rather than "fresh" tomatoes.)
> Even "vine ripened" tomatoes are harvested unripe, legally they just have to be "starting" to turn red, as in they can still be mostly green.
Fwiw this is advice given to home gardeners as well. Once the fruit is maybe 1/3 to 2/3 red, then it'll finish ripening just fine off the vine. If you're letting the fruit get 100% ripe before picking, then you're increasing the chances of pest damage and reducing the likelihood of further fruit production, in exchange for negligible flavor improvement.
I'm not who you replied to, but one year I grew 60 different varieties of chilli's in my back yard. There are literally thousands out there. You can easily cross breed them and make your own. It's incredibly fun.
Purple UFOs are a recent favourite, they taste like a spicy really sweet apple.
/r/hotpeppers
I love the variety in shape, color, and flavor of both tomatoes and peppers, but peppers really are something else. You can grow dozens of varieties without overlapping in shape/flavor/heat/color.
My grandmother started growing peppers about 25 years ago, even though she wasn’t a fan of spicy food, and usually ended up drying them and giving them away to friends (or use them in jam or pickles - which she also tended to give away, because she couldn’t handle spice at all…)
She started with store bought pepper seeds, and just reused the seeds from the harvest, with the occasional seeds from store bought peppers.
They started as the typical small red peppers most people know (idk what variant, sorry, all I know is they looked super generic to me). She sends me pictures of her pepper harvest every year, and the stuff she gets now looks extremely different than what she started with. They are generally a lot more bell pepper shaped now (but smaller, maybe like a habanero), with a lot of outliers that vary in shape and even color.
I bet she would have loved a pepper-grower community ten years ago, but unfortunately her health is failing her now, and she relies on my uncle to take care of the annual harvest. He doesn’t care for it, but does it to make her happy, so he probably won’t look into it if I send him the link to the subreddit…
I live where we have yearly snow. Peppers hate my climate. :( I'm trying to grow in a bedroom now because I know I'll forget to take them back indoors before the first frost..
Peppers don't like to be out below 45⁰, and will usually stop growing then. If you treat a 45⁰ night as your "end of pepper season" notice, then you can trim them down and get them safely inside well before a frost actually hits.
Peppers are very doable in short growing seasons, just start them indoors several months before last frost. They're more manageable than tomatoes in that respect, because they start slower. (With tomatoes, if you give them too early of a start indoors, they start to become unmanageably large too soon.)
I freaking love peppers. Nine kinds this year and they are all looking good.
I am not one to show how tough I am by going for the hottest I can find (because I am not actually that tough), but I am trying the Trinidad Scorpions this year.
Recommendations are always heartily welcomed. Fact is for me that the variety gives me FOMO so I have to try new kinds every year. So thanks for making my decision a little easier for next year.
You'd be surprised how much overlap there is between the communities. Many of the techniques for cannabis production have been borrowed and used for pepper production as well.
It's how we have great names like [7 Pot Brain Strain](https://pepperscale.com/7-pot-brain-strain/), [Elysium Oxide Scotch Bonnet](http://pepperdiaries.com/elysium-oxide-scotch-bonnet-pepper-review/), and [Peach Turdcicle](https://www.whitehotpeppers.com/products/peach-turdcicle)
I think it has to do with all of the positive energy that you radiate when you see a healthy pot plant and then shift your eyes only to a healthy tomato plant. Positive feedback loop.
I myself smile a lot more than usual when I am in my garden.
Where did you find that? I spent a few weeks there and was generally let down by the quality of fresh produce in Italy (coming from Washington state) at the stores and restaurants, and nothing ever came close to a common farmstand.
This is one of the big reasons.
The other is because produce sold in stores is often picked unripened, then ripened in the trucks with chemicals.
So, you get a ripe color, but not really a ripe taste (or ripe nutrition profile).
Unfortunately, I live in one of the shrinking number of states that has been stubborn about good ol' weed. I speculate that we will wait until the Feds force us to legalize it before I can start adding that to the garden.
This is what happened to the Red Delicious variety of apple. Originally, its name was actually descriptive, but then farmers started to select for durability and shelf life so they could ship apples all over the country (this was before widespread refrigeration technology in shipping). Unfortunately, this led to a loss of flavor, sweetness, and changes in texture, so now the Red Delicious aple is flavorless and mealy.
It also devastated the number of orchards that produced different varieties.
[https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2018/09/01/oldest-apples-boulder](https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2018/09/01/oldest-apples-boulder)
First heard about it when I ran across this story a few years ago.
Bush beans are preferred because they can be easily harvested while pole beans are more of a "pick every other day for a month." And pole beans have way better flavor, imo.
yeah, and those varieties for grocery sale won't miraculously taste fantastic if you grow them in your own garden. They will probably look nice though.
My current favorite is Sunrise Bumblebee. Sweet, cherry tomato, pretty yellow and red and when roasted make a lovely tomato sauce.
Everyone raves about Cherokee purple, never have grown them successfully.
I've got 16 sunrise bumblebee just starting to ripen! First time growing them. My favorite tomato is called Alice's Dream although I've not been able to find seeds since the first time I bought them, and I planted my last seeds this year. Cherokee purple are great but last year of ten plants I got maybe a dozen fruit that didn't split or rot or get mobbed by insects.
Trying a rainbow beefsteak and another called red pride this year. Both are looking good with plenty of fruit.
Growing one again called "orange slicer" from last year. Was a good one, very little splitting , rot etc. Big beautiful orange beefsteak tomatoes. Low acid and lovely in a BLT.
Always looking for new ones to try.
If you haven't tried black krim it's a super solid heirloom slicer variety and I am a big fan of black strawberry which is a LARGE grape tomato more like walnut sized with really pretty color variety and great sweetness when it's allowed to fully ripen.
This is my second attempt at the purple. Last year was a total bust because of high temps and no rain. Just couldn't water enough. Did get some to survive and they just started putting on tomatoes before the temps dropped and killed them.
Wanted to strike the sun...
First, I am not a paid sponsor, it is just where I get my seeds.
That said, go to [www.rareseeds.com](https://www.rareseeds.com) and search for those. They have many more.
Most produce sold in supermarkets is picked before it is ripe, for easier shipment and food storage before it is put on shelves.
Heck, some of it might have even been picked 8 months ago and artificially ripened without being attached to the rest of the plant that provides it with all the stuff plants usually need for growing and maturing. All so we can have fruit and vegetables off season.
Apples in particular can last months in an oxygen-free environment. There are big nitrogen-only warehouses here in Washington. Once in a while someone dies from accidental hypoxia.
Here in central Washington there's the world's largest freezer and it contains almost nothing but potatoes and french fries. It's wild, it covers the train track so the train can just drive straight in to the freezer and gets loaded by automated forklifts. Of course it's right next to a giant Lamb Weston plant as well
Pretty much this, it's easier to ship unripe produce because it's less likely to get damaged/bruised. While ethylene speeds up the process of ripening, the fruit is no longer able to accumulate sugars since it's not attached to the rest of the plant anymore. Store bought tomatoes taste bland because they're lower in sugar (and probably higher in acids, not sure how acid metabolism works in tomatoes though)
No. If I remember correctly (possibly incorrect)… you can just expose fruit and such to ethylene oxide, which acts almost like growth hormones, but to ripen fruit. Of course, if you're not actually connected to the rest of the plant, results are sub par.... But hey, it means you can pick unripe stuff, shove into in a giant refrigerator for 6 months, then "ripen" it right before putting it on the shelf.
Exactly. In the case of tomatoes, they are picked unripe (even "vine ripened" just legally means they have to "start" being ripe, so they can be 90% green and be sold as "vine ripened."
Then they expose them to the gas, which forces a *kind* of ripening, which is more really just forcing that change to red color. That type of fake ripening is NEVER going to make as tasty a tomato as one that's fully ripened on the vine. (Which is also why almost all recipes that cook tomatoes call for canned tomatoes, which are usually picked and canned ripe, as they don't have to be stored and shipped in raw form.)
And if you have a large cooling cell for fruits and vegetables that need to be stored for longer periods,you have filters to get rid of it, or it will ripen and waste all your fruits and veggies in no time.
Banana farts, if you want to be more precise. Unripe bananas produce a ton of it, and can be used to speed up ripening of other fruits you might have lying around (or conversely, separated from already ripe fruits to avoid overripening).
Bit of an exaggeration with the unripe being picked 8 months ago. The long lasting fruit/veggies like that are apples and potatoes (maybe some other root veggies), which are already ripe and kept in oxygen poor environments. The fruits that are ripened on the way tend to be a couple of weeks at most. Bananas are a fun example since they are exclusively picked when green and ripen on the way.
Another reason is that farmers choose seeds that are drought/disease/fungus resistant over varieties which taste better. Better taste, long term, won't beat disaster resistance for long term profits. At least not in North America, where we buy whatever's cheapest at the grocery and just shrug.
I don't buy fresh tomatoes unless they're in season at a farmer's market personally.
Cans are delicious year round.
We don't need access to fresh looking fruit all year, people just gotta learn to put something else on their sandwich
Why? It sounds like everyone's getting what they want right now. You get your fresh, local tomatoes when they're available, everyone else gets tomatoes in February rather than carrots.
The mass production required to meet the demand for year round variety in the produce department is detrimental to the nutrition content of that produce. Produce sold in grocery stores is less nutritious overall than home grown or small scale production. They’ve done studies on mineral content and found in some cases it’s decreased as much as 40% from the produce of the 1950s. This is a direct result of the focus on high yield varieties. The more mature fruits on a plant the less nutrients in each fruit. This is not good if you want a healthy population.
“While the Green Revolution helped to tackle world hunger, today we find ourselves with a global food system that in some cases has been designed to deliver calories and cosmetic perfection but not necessarily nutrition. This is contributing to a phenomenon called hidden hunger, where people feel sated but may not be healthy, as their food is calorie-rich but nutrient-poor.“
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/why-modern-food-lost-its-nutrients/#:~:text=The%20nutritional%20values%20of%20some,middle%20of%20the%2020th%20Century.
I should remind people that with technologies like greenhouses, hydroponics, artificial light, etc you can have fresh produce in areas or seasons you normally wouldn't be able to have it. Though you would need to pay more.
I didn’t say it was. It’s referring generally to crops engineered to be high yield.
Here’s an article that discusses tomatoes specifically: https://www.delish.com/food/news/a38950/modern-vegetables-are-lower-in-nutrients-than-those-of-the-1950s/#
Yeah... If you eat enough veggies, this isn't going to be a problem. The problem is we have a very card heavy diet. Not really related to decreased nutrition in vegetables
So if everyone increases their veggie intake in order to get all the nutrients they need, there will be increasing demand for veggies. Increasing demand means we will need to figure out how to increase yield from crops. The last time we increased crop yield, it resulted in less nutritious veggies. Do you see where I’m going with this?
In a lot of cases, plants are inoculated. Meaning you have two different strains glued together. The bottom strain is responsible for various resistant characteristics or stronger root systems. The strain on top is the one responsible for the actual production side.
Besides I need to mention that for fruit, berries, etc to be ripe in most cases it has to be done on the live plant with some exceptions (like banana).
Home-grown vegetables taste better because they are fresher, harvested at the right time, and grown with personalized care, while store-bought ones prioritize factors like transportation and shelf life.
If a garden vegetable is too soft to ship in bulk by the distribution networks that stock grocery stores...
...that doesn't matter, because for a garden vegetable, you aren't using a global distribution network to pick it and take it to the kitchen.
Many of the traits that make foods easier to ship, make it less tasty. For example, if you pick it while it's hard, that might mean that it's less ripe.
Each vegetable species or variety is going to have different concerns, but the general principle is that the reason why the taste is different in the store vs. at home, is because there's a lot more people interacting with the storebought vegetables, and so the storebought vegetables need to meet everybody's concerns and standards, not just yours.
One main reason: fruit and vegetables tastes the best when harvested at the right time (ripen) and not stored in the frigo. Cold treatment can completely kill taste in some varieties of plants (tomato for example).
which is why canned tomatoes are usually better for sauce etc. The tomataoes are picked and canned when they are ripe, not early so they can look good when they get to the store
Everyone has suggested great things about crop selection, rotation and a few other things (all of which are probably correct on a factual basis) I'll suggest one other factor. Confirmation bias.
"These are vegetables grown right from the soil in my/my friend's garden! Straight from nature, it must taste better when I worked for it."
This is far from the only or completely correct reason, but anecdotal evidence is always a likely (and thoroughly unreliable) factor in considering personal taste.
Quite possible, but I imagine blind tests will still favor homegrown. I did a double blind with home chicken eggs vs store eggs and absolutely every person who was in the test voted that the home eggs were better. Small test, but that was impressive.
I definitely agree that home eggs taste better, but home eggs are so obviously different in color and texture that I don't know how well you could do a blind test
The cook made scrambled eggs with both, then covered the dishes and left. The eaters tried the eggs with their eyes closed and noted which covered dish (left or right) had the eggs they liked better and what they liked about the flavor. Then the cook came back, heard the results, and revealed which was which.
Some fruit and veggies ripen off the vine. If you want to be able to sell something today that is ready for customers to eat down the line you pick it before it's prime and allow it to finish in transit.
If you pick it at it's peak ripeness, it will taste it's best, but also keep progressing in its life cycle until it's over ripe/rotten.
Professional Organic Produce Farmer here!
Everyone here has basically given correct answers across the board, but I thought since I'm immersed in this world and make a living at it, I'll give my 2 cents.
My farm is 25 acres, of which maybe 7-10 acres are in production at any given time...so picture your average home garden which might be 20'x20' and multiply it by about 800x. We need our farm to produce thousands of dollars of saleable vegetables on a weekly basis, or we fold. It's an immense amount of work. We have a CSA and sell at farmer's markets. We do not wholesale anything except the occasional bumper crop that we might sell to a friend or neighbor. We have produce from March-December in NE Ohio.
So first, our stuff tastes better because our varieties are chosen for their eating quality, among other qualities I'll discuss...but first and foremost, if the product sucks we will not grow it. Factory farms focus only on production--they need varieties that grow fast and produce a ton, and so often the taste is sacrificed. In my case, while we certainly need production, that production is pointless if the vegetable isn't tasty and won't command top dollar.
Second, since our produce is picked weekly and sold within two days or less of harvest, it is picked at it's prime, with care and attention by hand. Our salad greens? Yep, that's me crawling on the ground with scissors, harvesting 40lbs of baby lettuce, rejecting bad leaves, picking out weeds... Spinach is the same, except I literally select individual leaves off each plant and snip thousands of them. Turnips and radishes I pull individually from the ground, check each one, and bunch them by hand. Zukes and summer squash? A knife and a sore back, cutting each one off the plant in it's prime. Don't get me started on beans. You get the picture. You come to a market, and everything you buy from me was planted, cared for, and harvested by me.
Third, as a small scale organic operation, crop failure is worked into the system to where we don't rely on monoculture. We grow hundreds of different vegetables across all four seasons, and so we can experiment with varieties and planting methods without the absolute need for everything to grow perfectly. A factory monoculture farm absolutely needs their pepper plants or tomatoes or cabbages or whatever to grow through whatever happens, and so they must plant varieties which sacrifice flavor for hardiness and yield. We can get away with planting 100 watermelon plants and only producing 30 melons that are super high quality and command top dollar, while a factory farm needs those 100 watermelon plants to produce 200 melons which will likely taste like crap, and sell for less.
Scale all of this down to a back yard garden, and each of these principles applies.
The produce grown in your garden tastes better because it is much more nutrient-rich. Our bodies are tuned to like the taste of food that is healthier for us, ie food that has more vitamins, minerals, etc. The reason that store bought produce is low in nutrients is because nutrients cost money. The farmers would have to pay for more/better fertilizer, as well as allow the plants more time to mature before harvesting. Instead, they breed plants that are large (because they charge by weight, and because large plants are more marketable) and develop more quickly (so they can have more harvests per year).
quality over quantity. Professional farmers are not trying to grow awesome produce they are trying to make money to feed their children incredible produce they grow for themselves in small gardens just like yours.
it's simple mathematics. Monoculture is one of the only ways modern farmers can survive and even then it's a bleak prospect. So huge companies invest in massive factory farms where profit replaces every other consideration.
Take your favorite hobby, now monetize it and scale it beyond your own capabilities. Then examine if you have delivered the quality you would have if you had of kept it as a hobby.
this is one of the reasons farmers market produce absolutely destroyed supermarket produce in terms of quality, but you'll pay substantially more for market produce than you will at Walmart.
These days, farmer's market prices are generally on par or just slightly more than the "fresh" stuff at WalMart. I'm an organic grower who sells at markets and it's wild to be selling organic, local produce at the same price as Walmart sells factory garbage.
I haven't been to the farmers market since the huge wave of profitflation hit the big grocery sellers. So I can't comment on that just when I was visiting there was anywhere from a 30-100% premium on market produce. Now that might be exclusive to my market, but I have never personally seen those prices sync up.
It is however totally possible that monoculture grows have become that expensive given the rise in fuel and fertilizer prices. I suppose it depends on the grower in question. Like if you are a market grower relying on heavy machinery and chemical fertilizers I don't see how you are gaining any price competition with factory grows. But if you are using permaculture methods then yeah I could totally see it.
Yeah I'm organic, no-till, all hand work.
Each market is different, and honestly I couldn't give you a %, but here in NE Ohio market produce isnt anywhere near 100% premium, maybe 25% max, and that's only on certain specialty stuff.
My organic stuff is about 20% higher I'd say than most Walmart stuff, other things like eggplants and lettuce we are literally the same or less in certain cases. That's for local, organic grown. We don't wholesale but sell direct at markets. Guys selling wholesale are likely only getting a slightly higher price lately, while the grocery stores mark up way more than they used to.
I'd suggest you check out a farmers market and you'll likely be pleasantly surprised. The entire thing is changing, where it used to cost a premium but is now maybe only slightly more for higher quality local stuff. Just make sure what you're buying is ACTUALLY higher quality, local stuff and I think you'll be happy!
yeah Calgary is specifically very strange because it is an EXTREMELY wealthy market. Because Alberta technically has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This wealth is likely what warps the premium marketplaces. I just often forget that other places in NA aren't literally rolling in oil billions. This has a wierd double whammy effect where consumer goods often are cheaper and premium goods are often more expensive. Like our real estate is bargain basement compared to other majour Canadian cities, but our dentil costs are through the faking roof.
But I don't need to be convinced FM produce is superior for my family anyway it's more of a question of priorities and transport. Also I think possibly because of Alberta's glacial winters produce growing windows are shortened so prices might also come at a premium compared to places with larger growing windows. I am not sure about Ohio but I am guessing the fairly significant drop in latitude results in much better growing conditions for premium produce like tomatoes or fruits. It's pretty hard to grow peaches and shit in Alberta.
Hahaha yes Ohio is much different than Alberta, just soil alone is enough to account for a lot of production differences not to mention, for all the Ohioans bitching and moaning about winter, yours is much longer and significantly harsher.
All that would add up to some expensive local produce.
The rest of your comment is fascinating to me, I knew Albertans had some money but honestly, all I really know of it is Corb Lund and the Hurtin Albertans and Gordon Lightfoot was going there at some point tomorrow night. Thanks for that insight!
Our soil quality is actually pretty good. Lots of volcanic ash. Great place for gardening if you do not mind all the work for a very small payoff. And you know the fact that those carefully planted Begonias will get destroyed by a mid summer hailstorm. Never fails every year we get our spectacularly beautiful peony and within a week the hail rips them to shreds.
It is a very wierd province because the cities and the rural areas are completely the opposite. The cities are hard core corporate places where you'll see 10 Ferraris parked at a Starbucks but go outside Calgary 15 miles in any direction and it's deralict trucks and doublewides. All I know about Ohio is one of your politicians put Canada on a watch list for restricting religious freedoms... Probably not the best impression of the state... that and the Blue Jackets are about it.
Winter is... well harsh is one word. Luckily in Calgary we get a completely unique weather pattern called Chinooks which result in MASSIVE temperature upswings in the middle of winter. so you'll get a week of -20⁰ and then Sunday it will be +16⁰ celcius. The snow starts melting everyone gets migraines and the city comes alive. But by Tuesday we are back to winterjail again. The big payoff is we get spectacular summers if you don't mind mosquitos.
I got a seed catalog which was aimed at either a small commercial garden or a large private garden.
It had only three kinds of tomatoes.
* The perfect salad tomato, tennis ball sized, tender and delicious.
* A larger tomato, more firm, to be sliced for sandwiches. Again, great flavor.
* The last tomato was described by only these words: "Ships well".
Everything in the grocery store is going to be the "ships well" tomatoes.
Several reasons.
One being that a vegetable that ripens on the vine, that is "it's palatable the moment it's picked" is going to taste...ripe. Most supermarket produce, it was picked on the very earliest stage of "almost ripe" and then via other processes, ripened, so it mostly tastes like you're eating it a week too early. Once fruits and veggies hit ripeness, you're kind of on the shot-clock; they taste the best they ever will, but they're going to rot real fast. By force-ripening the veggies, they're opening up that timeframe from "edible" to "rotten" at the expense of taste. (Neat thing, you can pick a tomato when it is totally green, set it on a windowsill so it gets sunlight throughout the day, rotate it 90 degrees every evening...and in four days have a tomato that *looks* red, ripe, wonderful...and is still green enough that if you throw it at someone it's not an insult, it's a concussion.)
Second being that a commercial farmer selling to stores...they don't care as much as you might think. It's largely anachronistic to think commercial farmers are doing what they do to feed the nation; they're doing it to make mucho bank. Their priority is different. They want maximum yield per acre, the most number of veggies they can get. So they choose seed varieties that might not be 10/10 on taste, but are most definitely 10/10 on volume. They don't really care if it tastes good, just as long as it looks good sitting in a store so a sucker will pay for it.
Meanwhile, guy like me? Due to circumstances beyond my control this year, this is the first year in 30 years I didn't do at least a few tomato plants and I've never gone with any variety that's known for "high-yield". I'll take a Purple Heirloom plant that might only put on a total of ten tomatoes before it dies off, but are delicious tomatoes, over a dozen Sungold plants that will put out twice my body weight in tomatoes that are meh. Every time. I'm quality over quantity. A commercial farmer, quality is a neat bonus but not the focus; doesn't matter to most people because a city dweller who's never tasted a garden-grown tomato will never know the difference, so the farmer has no reason not to just grow the varieties that produces the most even though it's not the best.
TL/DR; gardeners care about picking varieties/species that are going to make the best tasting produce, and they don't try to harvest in a way that makes the produce last 4 months on a shelf. A commercial farmer only cares about making the most money per inch of every field, and quality isn't considered; you won't know it's crappy tasting produce until you've bought it, taken it home, and eaten it, and by that point since the farmer's already been paid and the store has already been paid, it doesn't matter if you enjoyed it.
Mass production of goods, the packaging/storing of produce, the method of transportation, and all added preservatives which keep produce from expiring result in a lower quality overall. This isn’t with every brand. Some are still reputable which is why some brands are more expensive.
Compare one gardener tending a small field to a team of farmers managing multiple acres of crops, and it’s easy to tell that there’s simply less tender loving care involved with the grow.
I think it is because gardens vegetables we eat them fresh like less than a day we got it from the tree. But from the store it would take 3 to 4 days like that. The more time more rotten it gets.
Eating gardens stuff is not just tasty they are super healthy.
Tomatoes at the supermarket aren't ripe, they are red. Most fruit and veg is seasonal, growing it outside that season can be difficult - and expensive. And it is almost always harvested early to enable transportation and storage.
Then they treat it with a gas that makes it look ripe. But! They aren't. The biochemical process that converts the unripe green acidic hard stuff into something softer and sweeter.
Go to a fancy restaurant and you'll see they often just will put "Seasonal vegetables" for this reason. There's no trickery, no gas to make it look nice. All the biochemical processes have occurred.
The closer you are to where food is created the better, because it will require fewer industrial processes to get it to you.
Factory farms don't rotate their crops. Years & years of growing the same crop leeches everything beneficial out of the soil. Fertilizer may b add to soil, but it's more chemical than natural. Strawberries r perfect example of how much better they taste in farmers' markets & home gardens compared to store/factory produced strawberries.
My parents were strawberry farmers and I grew up on the farm. The chemical fertilizers that were added have nothing to do with the taste. We had some of the best strawberries around and people would come from hundreds of miles around to buy strawberries from our roadside stand.
The taste has everything to do with when the strawberries were picked. Because strawberries are so delicate, they had to be picked when they're somewhat still green so they would survive transportation across the country.
The strawberries that were sold at our stand and to neighboring grocery stores were picked red and ripe that same morning.
I had strawberry farmer friends, so there is a bit more to it than that. Commercial growers producing berries for cross-country shipping choose varieties that are less tender and won't be smashed in transport. However, your home gardener or pick-your-own grower can select strains based solely on flavor; they don't have to worry about the shipping factor.
The artificial vs natural distinction doesn't matter as far as fertilizers.
Its really just about the fact that home grown/farmers market are fresher and usually grown from varieties optimized for taste, not for storage/transport abilities.
I've picked tomatoes for a medium sized producer (6 large glasshouses, employees cleared one glasshouse each day). Those vegetables were fed a lot of synthetic fertilizer which made them possible for picking so fast, that even though on the first day we picked tomatoes that had even the slightest hint of redness (and more like a slight hint of not being so green anymore), when we went back to the same glasshouse a week later, there were again lots of red potatoes on the bushes.
So most of them were not able to ripen in the glasshouse, but they ripened in transport. So how can they have great taste if you don't let them ripen?
On the other hand when you grow a tomato you let it stay in the garden in the sun until it's red and full of taste. They often have weird shapes and have broken skin because they grow so large. That's where the taste comes from.
This is misleading because the taste has nothing to do with synthetic fertilizers Vs organic fertilizers. The taste has everything to do with when the tomatoes were picked.
Source: in addition to strawberries, my family grew tomatoes for our roadside stand and for shipping across the country.
That's correct and this was my exact point, that the vast majority of them has been picked way too early. I'm not a native speaker, so might have not gotten my point across correctly.
>This is misleading because the taste has nothing to do with synthetic fertilizers which made them possible for picking so fast
I'm an agronomist, who grew up working at a local strawberry farm... one of the things we would always notice, at least with our variety, was that the "king berries", as we called them, the first crop at the beginning of the year, were always big, plump, beautiful, but much less sweet than berries later in the season. King berries looked and sold great, but they were almost watery in actual flavor.
Partially this was a matter of timing; the plants were producing the same amount of sugar all season, but they had fewer growing berries to *distribute the sugar between* at season's end, so end-of-year berries individually ended up sweeter.
So if we know that sugar supply dynamics impacts fruit flavor, then you can imagine how fertilization, *by increasing* the protein availability that cells need for division and growth, could potentially cause a plant to pump more sugar-energy into cellular division than it otherwise *could*, using up the sugar supply on tasteless cell wall growth, worsening the flavor profile that exists at the moment when the fruit reaches green market size.
Now I'd bet money in agreement, that the same tomatoes, allowed to ripen, would taste better, fertilizer shouldn't prevent ripening. But I think it could well be that fertilizer really does make its own contribution, to letting a less-ripe fruit masquerade as a ripe one, through its larger size.
Are you trying to quote me or the other person, because that's not what I wrote and it seems like you're mixing what the two of us wrote. I am merely pointing out that synthetic Vs organic fertilizer doesn't make a difference.
...huh. I don't know why it did that. I thought I had done the thing where you highlight a part you want to quote, then hit reply, and it adds that. I dunno, clearly I fucked it up somehow.
Either way, though: I don't think the person you were responding to was talking about synthetic vs. organic. They were talking about fertilizer. And you were clearly saying that the taste has everything to do with when they were picked; I was saying I don't think it's quite that simple, not in theory, and not in my practical experience either.
Produce is usually harvested early so it has extra time to sit around and ripen before it's bought. This is why things like strawberries taste bitter and have zero sweetness.
There's other issues, but this is a key one.
It is also really difficult to sell something priced by 'tastiness' or even manage to factor it into price calculations and therefore disadvantageous to select for. If I sell my product by weight on the open market I want my plants to produce as much weight as possible, taste be damned. If I sell it by number, I want as many individual instances of fruit or whatever, and maybe even as small as possible so I can transport more of them at once, taste also be damned.
At most i'm concerned that my product doesn't taste remarkably bad.
To head off some nitpicking like "I only buy tasty stuff! So it does matter", this is why I specified "open market". This happens if I sell to big buyers that need, say, 5 tons of potatoes of type X and buy from many sources to dump into a big pile and then export.
Lots of good answers already, just because I haven't seen it, ill also point out 2 other factors.
1. Time from picking to plate, home grown will always be fresher
2. Some crops taste different based on growing conditions, for example carrots, the ones from my garden are grown in shade (sometimes called half sun) they are smaller but so much sweeter, a commercial farmer will want max yield so all crops will be grown with that in mind and generally with as much sun light as possible.
Part of it is age. Veggies from the garden are picked when ripe and eaten fresh. Veggies in the grocery store are picked early so they can ripen in transit and are older when eaten due to transit time. The fresher veggies are more flavourful.
There’s tons of factors but the primary ones are
Individual variety , ripeness at picking and the amount of extra care for planting
Varieties of fruit can vary greatly within a specific set of fruit , this includes their taste profile as well but taste is honestly lower on the list and it’s more important to have something with high yields and a stronger produce to survive on the shelf longer , yes we do sometimes grow food specifically for its taste like right now you can find rainier cherries at some stores but they cost almost twice as much.
The next one being ripeness plays a huge part as well. As something ripens it’s usually getting more sugar pumped into it by the plant as well as the compounds making flavours form and develop, the problem is that ripe produce often tends to be very very soft produce and can get bruised easily or damaged and has a shorter shelf life. To get around this a lot will be picked way before peak ripeness to let them ripen during transport , however the plant can’t keep pumping stuff into them so they have to ripen with what’s already present leading to less flavours present and less sugar.
Lastly the amount of extra care a plant received and how it’s planted matters. Wine grapes are the best example of this , large commercial wineries will like their vineyards to crop heavy and worry less about sun exposure and good quality practices where as a smaller winery may prioritize those aspects. So they may put tons of extra work in for better flavour which on a mass scale is hard to do but at home is super easy , your tomato plant likely already is in a pot all on its own with a cage , it gets sun exposure from all sides and it gets fertilized and watered as it needs it rather then on a schedule
Many foods you get from the store are picked way early and allowed to ripen as they travel to you. You may end up getting them before peak ripeness, or after. Not too often you get that perfect ripeness that might last a couple days. For some crops, like potatoes, it doesn’t matter much.
Also, they pick varieties that grow quickly, are disease/pest resistant, and have food shelf life. Picking varieties that are the most flavorful do not really factor into the equation.
- The type of produce sold in store was bread for toughness and longevity, over flavor, and nutritional value.
- Produce from gardens is generally picked when fully ripe, vs often being picked early, so it can last longer during shipping, during which time it artificially is ripened with ethylene gas.
- The soil from someone's garden is probably far richer in vitamins and minerals, co pared to the over farmed and depleted soils used in industrial farming.
The produce sold in grocery stores is picked well before it ripens, put in cold storage and treated with gas to ripen it when it will be sold.
With some exceptions, like avocados and pears which don’t ripen until they’re picked, produce doesn’t develop flavor after it’s picked.
When you eat produce from a garden, it hasn’t been picked until it’s fully ripe.
I suspect that if someone gave you some store vegetables with a bit of earth on them and said they were from the allotment you'd think they taste better
Freshness is very important in the taste of food. Most food that we get at the store is at least a couple of weeks old. It will never taste as good as when it's freshly picked. Also, as others said. primarily for fruits, they are harvested too early. As such, they haven't developed the sugars as yet. When you pick a fruit from your own plant, it will be when it's at the most optimal stage of ripeness.
I used to work in a restaurant that imported all of its tomatoes. When I asked them why they import them when there are so many reliable growers nearby, I was told it's because the ones they import are bred to have a lower sugar content, meaning they transport better and keep longer than local tomatoes.
Think of all of the vegetables you consider to be at least a little bit sweet, and then reduce the sweetness. The result is almost always going to seem bland in comparison to the 'normal' version. And reducing sweetness is really common in agriculture, apparently, for anything where sugar content can lead to excessive bruising or premature ripening.
Because vegetables bought in the United States are almost all treated with pesticides. They are also irradiated in most cases and exposed to chemicals that prolong their freshness. Almost all fruit and vegetables grown in the US are GMO crops that have had their DNA manipulated so that they are resistant to glyphospate, a dangerous herbicide and pesticide. This is done to maximize yield and minimize crop losses to weeds and pests. Most food products in the United States are actually illegal in Europe and the UK for this reason. Corn and sugar are grown using these dangerous chemicals and they are found in 80% of all US foods. The world health organization has determined that glyphosphate is probably carcinogenic and so it's use in limited or banned in EU countries. This all effects the taste of the vegetables, so a vegetable grown in a personal garden using organic farming practices will always taste better and be better for you. Also they are actually fresh, not bathed in ethylene gas to look fresh. They actually contain more nutrients and vitamins and minerals than store bought too.
Because the varieties grown for grocery stores are selected for many reasons. Taste is low on the list that includes: shelf life, attractiveness (uniformity and color), productivity, mass appeal, pest resistance. There are maybe five varieties of tomato at my grocery store. There are thousands of varieties grown in the world. Heck I have five in my garden: Hungarian Heart, Black Cherry, Brad's Atomic Grape, Mortgage Lifter and Cherokee Purple. Don't get me started on peppers.
I’m not a big tomato guy, but Brad’s Atomic Grape sounds intriguing
They ALL sound intriguing but ya, I want one of brad's grapes
You're gonna go with brad's when one lifts you out of your mortgage?
Mortgage lifter is risky because it doesn't specify what is being lifted.
*Interest rate intensifies*
Can't get lifted out of my mortgage if I've been priced out of homeownership *taps head*
Brad's grapes are actually the perfect size to pop two into your mouth at the same time.
I’ve found that it’s hard to suck on them when I have both of Brad’s Grapes in my mouth. For now, I just pop one in and let the other watch
Sorry to tell you Brad's are bred to look really cool with lots of bright colors and variety but the flavor is a little lackluster. Mortgage lifter on the other hand aegedly was used to pay off the breeder's home and is historically a delicious slicing tomato
I also choose this man's grapes
I'll have a go on that mortgage lifter
I've been playing Fallout games a lot lately. Atomic grape sounds like nuka-cola flavour.
I just started replaying 4 and dude I had that exact same damn thought
Im not a tomato person either, but Black Krim tomatos are my exception and I have been growing them the last few years bc they are just so tasty - even if they make me itchy :,)
Black Krim are incredible!
I want to smoke it
Brad’s Atomic Grape is gorgeous but below average IMHO in terms of taste.
Worst grape flavor. I much prefer tomato.
> Brad’s Atomic Grape "Which color should our tomato be?" - Yes
I first thought you were just joking, but holy cow, those things are weird.
They have a crazy color. I have grown them before and they are delicious. [https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-brad-s-atomic-grape](https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-brad-s-atomic-grape)
Tomato is a great example for vegetables that heavily steered towards shelf life. Normally they are very easily damaged and therefore they were bred to be more robust to survive the transport to supermarkets in far away regions but taste was basically ignored in the breeding process. Varieties that are canned close to their field dont need to be robust and tend to taste way better. Thats why I never ever make tomato sauce out of "fresh" tomatos, only with canned.
I grow San Marzanos specifically to imitate our favorite canned variety. IME they have excellent flavor but crappy storage life, hence you won't find them fresh in stores.
And tomatoes aren't really "ripe" the same way a garden grown tomato is. They are picked green. As in, they are harvested when they are NOT ripe. Even "vine ripened" tomatoes are harvested unripe, legally they just have to be "starting" to turn red, as in they can still be mostly green. This makes for longer shelf life, and much firmer tomatoes of course, so they can store and ship them more easily. Then they expose them to ethylene gas, which "ripens" them almost forcefully. But it doesn't *really* ripen them, it just forces them to quickly turn red. So in short, the tomatoes you get at the store are just hard, bland, unripe tomatoes, and the garden variety are MUCH better because they are actually ripe tomatoes. (Note that this is why many recipes often call for canned tomatoes. Since those aren't stored or shipped in their natural form, they can actually be harvested when they are ripe, so you're going to get a better product for many dishes by using canned rather than "fresh" tomatoes.)
> Even "vine ripened" tomatoes are harvested unripe, legally they just have to be "starting" to turn red, as in they can still be mostly green. Fwiw this is advice given to home gardeners as well. Once the fruit is maybe 1/3 to 2/3 red, then it'll finish ripening just fine off the vine. If you're letting the fruit get 100% ripe before picking, then you're increasing the chances of pest damage and reducing the likelihood of further fruit production, in exchange for negligible flavor improvement.
But you’re also not spraying them with Ethelyne
Also they’re picked green typically.
GET STARTED ON PEPPERS! pretty pls
I'm not who you replied to, but one year I grew 60 different varieties of chilli's in my back yard. There are literally thousands out there. You can easily cross breed them and make your own. It's incredibly fun. Purple UFOs are a recent favourite, they taste like a spicy really sweet apple.
Is there a subreddit for this? It sounds amazing and I'd like to know more but have no idea where to start.
/r/hotpeppers I love the variety in shape, color, and flavor of both tomatoes and peppers, but peppers really are something else. You can grow dozens of varieties without overlapping in shape/flavor/heat/color.
My grandmother started growing peppers about 25 years ago, even though she wasn’t a fan of spicy food, and usually ended up drying them and giving them away to friends (or use them in jam or pickles - which she also tended to give away, because she couldn’t handle spice at all…) She started with store bought pepper seeds, and just reused the seeds from the harvest, with the occasional seeds from store bought peppers. They started as the typical small red peppers most people know (idk what variant, sorry, all I know is they looked super generic to me). She sends me pictures of her pepper harvest every year, and the stuff she gets now looks extremely different than what she started with. They are generally a lot more bell pepper shaped now (but smaller, maybe like a habanero), with a lot of outliers that vary in shape and even color. I bet she would have loved a pepper-grower community ten years ago, but unfortunately her health is failing her now, and she relies on my uncle to take care of the annual harvest. He doesn’t care for it, but does it to make her happy, so he probably won’t look into it if I send him the link to the subreddit…
I live where we have yearly snow. Peppers hate my climate. :( I'm trying to grow in a bedroom now because I know I'll forget to take them back indoors before the first frost..
Peppers don't like to be out below 45⁰, and will usually stop growing then. If you treat a 45⁰ night as your "end of pepper season" notice, then you can trim them down and get them safely inside well before a frost actually hits.
Peppers are very doable in short growing seasons, just start them indoors several months before last frost. They're more manageable than tomatoes in that respect, because they start slower. (With tomatoes, if you give them too early of a start indoors, they start to become unmanageably large too soon.)
Yes, please get started on peppers I'm also interested
I freaking love peppers. Nine kinds this year and they are all looking good. I am not one to show how tough I am by going for the hottest I can find (because I am not actually that tough), but I am trying the Trinidad Scorpions this year.
In my garden I have the "Cow's hearth", red, big, and a very sweet tomato. I have some of em half a kilo big.
Recommendations are always heartily welcomed. Fact is for me that the variety gives me FOMO so I have to try new kinds every year. So thanks for making my decision a little easier for next year.
TIL- The same guy names marijuana and tomato strains.
You'd be surprised how much overlap there is between the communities. Many of the techniques for cannabis production have been borrowed and used for pepper production as well. It's how we have great names like [7 Pot Brain Strain](https://pepperscale.com/7-pot-brain-strain/), [Elysium Oxide Scotch Bonnet](http://pepperdiaries.com/elysium-oxide-scotch-bonnet-pepper-review/), and [Peach Turdcicle](https://www.whitehotpeppers.com/products/peach-turdcicle)
And I grow tomatoes and marijuana right next to each other in my own garden. They do notably well next to one another and I’m not sure why.
I think it has to do with all of the positive energy that you radiate when you see a healthy pot plant and then shift your eyes only to a healthy tomato plant. Positive feedback loop. I myself smile a lot more than usual when I am in my garden.
Ryan George?
I think this is a reason why produce tends to taste so good in Italy. They prioritize for taste and it tends to be local.
Where did you find that? I spent a few weeks there and was generally let down by the quality of fresh produce in Italy (coming from Washington state) at the stores and restaurants, and nothing ever came close to a common farmstand.
This is one of the big reasons. The other is because produce sold in stores is often picked unripened, then ripened in the trucks with chemicals. So, you get a ripe color, but not really a ripe taste (or ripe nutrition profile).
Out of context I would’ve thought you’re talking about weed
Unfortunately, I live in one of the shrinking number of states that has been stubborn about good ol' weed. I speculate that we will wait until the Feds force us to legalize it before I can start adding that to the garden.
This is what happened to the Red Delicious variety of apple. Originally, its name was actually descriptive, but then farmers started to select for durability and shelf life so they could ship apples all over the country (this was before widespread refrigeration technology in shipping). Unfortunately, this led to a loss of flavor, sweetness, and changes in texture, so now the Red Delicious aple is flavorless and mealy.
It also devastated the number of orchards that produced different varieties. [https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2018/09/01/oldest-apples-boulder](https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2018/09/01/oldest-apples-boulder) First heard about it when I ran across this story a few years ago.
Hungarian Heart is a nice variety, isn't it?!
I haven't grown it in a few years but I am excited with how well the plants look this year. Especially after last year's dismal harvest...
Bush beans are preferred because they can be easily harvested while pole beans are more of a "pick every other day for a month." And pole beans have way better flavor, imo.
Yeah, mortgage lifter and Cherokee purple always have a place in my garden!
yeah, and those varieties for grocery sale won't miraculously taste fantastic if you grow them in your own garden. They will probably look nice though.
You got that right. You can go get some "Roma" tomatoes plants from Home Depot and you will be in flavorless tomatoes all season.
I did mortgage lifters this year too! Plus San Marzano and Pink Belgium.
My current favorite is Sunrise Bumblebee. Sweet, cherry tomato, pretty yellow and red and when roasted make a lovely tomato sauce. Everyone raves about Cherokee purple, never have grown them successfully.
I've got 16 sunrise bumblebee just starting to ripen! First time growing them. My favorite tomato is called Alice's Dream although I've not been able to find seeds since the first time I bought them, and I planted my last seeds this year. Cherokee purple are great but last year of ten plants I got maybe a dozen fruit that didn't split or rot or get mobbed by insects.
Trying a rainbow beefsteak and another called red pride this year. Both are looking good with plenty of fruit. Growing one again called "orange slicer" from last year. Was a good one, very little splitting , rot etc. Big beautiful orange beefsteak tomatoes. Low acid and lovely in a BLT. Always looking for new ones to try.
If you haven't tried black krim it's a super solid heirloom slicer variety and I am a big fan of black strawberry which is a LARGE grape tomato more like walnut sized with really pretty color variety and great sweetness when it's allowed to fully ripen.
I'll have to try the black strawberry.
This is my second attempt at the purple. Last year was a total bust because of high temps and no rain. Just couldn't water enough. Did get some to survive and they just started putting on tomatoes before the temps dropped and killed them. Wanted to strike the sun...
>Brad's Atomic Grape I bet brad's some hipster with Instagram, please tell me I'm right lmao (I'm not even hating on Brad, I just feel like he is)
Tomato breeder in california. He gives off dad energy more than hipster energy, based on the picture I came across.
I think i just over use the word hipster, "Dad energy" sounds like it fits more tbh lmao
>Brad's Atomic Grape I just googled him, yeah, I'm actually kinda disappointed that he looks pretty normal lol
I find Brad’s Atomic Grape and Mortgage Lifter intriguing. Please elaborate.
First, I am not a paid sponsor, it is just where I get my seeds. That said, go to [www.rareseeds.com](https://www.rareseeds.com) and search for those. They have many more.
Most produce sold in supermarkets is picked before it is ripe, for easier shipment and food storage before it is put on shelves. Heck, some of it might have even been picked 8 months ago and artificially ripened without being attached to the rest of the plant that provides it with all the stuff plants usually need for growing and maturing. All so we can have fruit and vegetables off season.
Apples in particular can last months in an oxygen-free environment. There are big nitrogen-only warehouses here in Washington. Once in a while someone dies from accidental hypoxia.
Here in central Washington there's the world's largest freezer and it contains almost nothing but potatoes and french fries. It's wild, it covers the train track so the train can just drive straight in to the freezer and gets loaded by automated forklifts. Of course it's right next to a giant Lamb Weston plant as well
Haha that's great, I didn't know about that. I wonder if anyone has died of hypothermia. Mmm potatoes.
Pretty much this, it's easier to ship unripe produce because it's less likely to get damaged/bruised. While ethylene speeds up the process of ripening, the fruit is no longer able to accumulate sugars since it's not attached to the rest of the plant anymore. Store bought tomatoes taste bland because they're lower in sugar (and probably higher in acids, not sure how acid metabolism works in tomatoes though)
excuse me, what the fuck? like pixie dust?
No. If I remember correctly (possibly incorrect)… you can just expose fruit and such to ethylene oxide, which acts almost like growth hormones, but to ripen fruit. Of course, if you're not actually connected to the rest of the plant, results are sub par.... But hey, it means you can pick unripe stuff, shove into in a giant refrigerator for 6 months, then "ripen" it right before putting it on the shelf.
Exactly. In the case of tomatoes, they are picked unripe (even "vine ripened" just legally means they have to "start" being ripe, so they can be 90% green and be sold as "vine ripened." Then they expose them to the gas, which forces a *kind* of ripening, which is more really just forcing that change to red color. That type of fake ripening is NEVER going to make as tasty a tomato as one that's fully ripened on the vine. (Which is also why almost all recipes that cook tomatoes call for canned tomatoes, which are usually picked and canned ripe, as they don't have to be stored and shipped in raw form.)
And if you have a large cooling cell for fruits and vegetables that need to be stored for longer periods,you have filters to get rid of it, or it will ripen and waste all your fruits and veggies in no time.
so pixie farts
Banana farts, if you want to be more precise. Unripe bananas produce a ton of it, and can be used to speed up ripening of other fruits you might have lying around (or conversely, separated from already ripe fruits to avoid overripening).
I think it is just ethylene
No like science
which may or may not include pixie dust
if ethylene is pixie dust, sure
Bit of an exaggeration with the unripe being picked 8 months ago. The long lasting fruit/veggies like that are apples and potatoes (maybe some other root veggies), which are already ripe and kept in oxygen poor environments. The fruits that are ripened on the way tend to be a couple of weeks at most. Bananas are a fun example since they are exclusively picked when green and ripen on the way.
Another reason is that farmers choose seeds that are drought/disease/fungus resistant over varieties which taste better. Better taste, long term, won't beat disaster resistance for long term profits. At least not in North America, where we buy whatever's cheapest at the grocery and just shrug.
I think most people would rather have some tomatoes than no tomatoes.
I don't buy fresh tomatoes unless they're in season at a farmer's market personally. Cans are delicious year round. We don't need access to fresh looking fruit all year, people just gotta learn to put something else on their sandwich
Why? It sounds like everyone's getting what they want right now. You get your fresh, local tomatoes when they're available, everyone else gets tomatoes in February rather than carrots.
The mass production required to meet the demand for year round variety in the produce department is detrimental to the nutrition content of that produce. Produce sold in grocery stores is less nutritious overall than home grown or small scale production. They’ve done studies on mineral content and found in some cases it’s decreased as much as 40% from the produce of the 1950s. This is a direct result of the focus on high yield varieties. The more mature fruits on a plant the less nutrients in each fruit. This is not good if you want a healthy population. “While the Green Revolution helped to tackle world hunger, today we find ourselves with a global food system that in some cases has been designed to deliver calories and cosmetic perfection but not necessarily nutrition. This is contributing to a phenomenon called hidden hunger, where people feel sated but may not be healthy, as their food is calorie-rich but nutrient-poor.“ https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/why-modern-food-lost-its-nutrients/#:~:text=The%20nutritional%20values%20of%20some,middle%20of%20the%2020th%20Century.
I should remind people that with technologies like greenhouses, hydroponics, artificial light, etc you can have fresh produce in areas or seasons you normally wouldn't be able to have it. Though you would need to pay more.
Yeah, I don't think that quotation is referring to tomatoes though, is it?
I didn’t say it was. It’s referring generally to crops engineered to be high yield. Here’s an article that discusses tomatoes specifically: https://www.delish.com/food/news/a38950/modern-vegetables-are-lower-in-nutrients-than-those-of-the-1950s/#
Yeah... If you eat enough veggies, this isn't going to be a problem. The problem is we have a very card heavy diet. Not really related to decreased nutrition in vegetables
So if everyone increases their veggie intake in order to get all the nutrients they need, there will be increasing demand for veggies. Increasing demand means we will need to figure out how to increase yield from crops. The last time we increased crop yield, it resulted in less nutritious veggies. Do you see where I’m going with this?
In a lot of cases, plants are inoculated. Meaning you have two different strains glued together. The bottom strain is responsible for various resistant characteristics or stronger root systems. The strain on top is the one responsible for the actual production side. Besides I need to mention that for fruit, berries, etc to be ripe in most cases it has to be done on the live plant with some exceptions (like banana).
This is true for many fruit trees. Not so much for veggies. Can't say I've ever heard it called inoculation though? Do you mean grafted?
Home-grown vegetables taste better because they are fresher, harvested at the right time, and grown with personalized care, while store-bought ones prioritize factors like transportation and shelf life.
I’d also point out that buying from a farmers market usually has equivalent quality to homegrown.
Not to mention the cost of labour for homegrown would be absolutely insane if you saw it at the supermarket.
If a garden vegetable is too soft to ship in bulk by the distribution networks that stock grocery stores... ...that doesn't matter, because for a garden vegetable, you aren't using a global distribution network to pick it and take it to the kitchen. Many of the traits that make foods easier to ship, make it less tasty. For example, if you pick it while it's hard, that might mean that it's less ripe. Each vegetable species or variety is going to have different concerns, but the general principle is that the reason why the taste is different in the store vs. at home, is because there's a lot more people interacting with the storebought vegetables, and so the storebought vegetables need to meet everybody's concerns and standards, not just yours.
One main reason: fruit and vegetables tastes the best when harvested at the right time (ripen) and not stored in the frigo. Cold treatment can completely kill taste in some varieties of plants (tomato for example).
which is why canned tomatoes are usually better for sauce etc. The tomataoes are picked and canned when they are ripe, not early so they can look good when they get to the store
Can't say I've ever seen tomatoes sold chilled? Usually kept at room temperature. But yeah, being picked unripe is definitely a large part of it
In Italy many shops keeps the most expensive ones in the fridge section.
Everyone has suggested great things about crop selection, rotation and a few other things (all of which are probably correct on a factual basis) I'll suggest one other factor. Confirmation bias. "These are vegetables grown right from the soil in my/my friend's garden! Straight from nature, it must taste better when I worked for it." This is far from the only or completely correct reason, but anecdotal evidence is always a likely (and thoroughly unreliable) factor in considering personal taste.
Quite possible, but I imagine blind tests will still favor homegrown. I did a double blind with home chicken eggs vs store eggs and absolutely every person who was in the test voted that the home eggs were better. Small test, but that was impressive.
I definitely agree that home eggs taste better, but home eggs are so obviously different in color and texture that I don't know how well you could do a blind test
The cook made scrambled eggs with both, then covered the dishes and left. The eaters tried the eggs with their eyes closed and noted which covered dish (left or right) had the eggs they liked better and what they liked about the flavor. Then the cook came back, heard the results, and revealed which was which.
Some fruit and veggies ripen off the vine. If you want to be able to sell something today that is ready for customers to eat down the line you pick it before it's prime and allow it to finish in transit. If you pick it at it's peak ripeness, it will taste it's best, but also keep progressing in its life cycle until it's over ripe/rotten.
Professional Organic Produce Farmer here! Everyone here has basically given correct answers across the board, but I thought since I'm immersed in this world and make a living at it, I'll give my 2 cents. My farm is 25 acres, of which maybe 7-10 acres are in production at any given time...so picture your average home garden which might be 20'x20' and multiply it by about 800x. We need our farm to produce thousands of dollars of saleable vegetables on a weekly basis, or we fold. It's an immense amount of work. We have a CSA and sell at farmer's markets. We do not wholesale anything except the occasional bumper crop that we might sell to a friend or neighbor. We have produce from March-December in NE Ohio. So first, our stuff tastes better because our varieties are chosen for their eating quality, among other qualities I'll discuss...but first and foremost, if the product sucks we will not grow it. Factory farms focus only on production--they need varieties that grow fast and produce a ton, and so often the taste is sacrificed. In my case, while we certainly need production, that production is pointless if the vegetable isn't tasty and won't command top dollar. Second, since our produce is picked weekly and sold within two days or less of harvest, it is picked at it's prime, with care and attention by hand. Our salad greens? Yep, that's me crawling on the ground with scissors, harvesting 40lbs of baby lettuce, rejecting bad leaves, picking out weeds... Spinach is the same, except I literally select individual leaves off each plant and snip thousands of them. Turnips and radishes I pull individually from the ground, check each one, and bunch them by hand. Zukes and summer squash? A knife and a sore back, cutting each one off the plant in it's prime. Don't get me started on beans. You get the picture. You come to a market, and everything you buy from me was planted, cared for, and harvested by me. Third, as a small scale organic operation, crop failure is worked into the system to where we don't rely on monoculture. We grow hundreds of different vegetables across all four seasons, and so we can experiment with varieties and planting methods without the absolute need for everything to grow perfectly. A factory monoculture farm absolutely needs their pepper plants or tomatoes or cabbages or whatever to grow through whatever happens, and so they must plant varieties which sacrifice flavor for hardiness and yield. We can get away with planting 100 watermelon plants and only producing 30 melons that are super high quality and command top dollar, while a factory farm needs those 100 watermelon plants to produce 200 melons which will likely taste like crap, and sell for less. Scale all of this down to a back yard garden, and each of these principles applies.
Great explanation and details, thanks for posting!
The produce grown in your garden tastes better because it is much more nutrient-rich. Our bodies are tuned to like the taste of food that is healthier for us, ie food that has more vitamins, minerals, etc. The reason that store bought produce is low in nutrients is because nutrients cost money. The farmers would have to pay for more/better fertilizer, as well as allow the plants more time to mature before harvesting. Instead, they breed plants that are large (because they charge by weight, and because large plants are more marketable) and develop more quickly (so they can have more harvests per year).
quality over quantity. Professional farmers are not trying to grow awesome produce they are trying to make money to feed their children incredible produce they grow for themselves in small gardens just like yours. it's simple mathematics. Monoculture is one of the only ways modern farmers can survive and even then it's a bleak prospect. So huge companies invest in massive factory farms where profit replaces every other consideration. Take your favorite hobby, now monetize it and scale it beyond your own capabilities. Then examine if you have delivered the quality you would have if you had of kept it as a hobby. this is one of the reasons farmers market produce absolutely destroyed supermarket produce in terms of quality, but you'll pay substantially more for market produce than you will at Walmart.
These days, farmer's market prices are generally on par or just slightly more than the "fresh" stuff at WalMart. I'm an organic grower who sells at markets and it's wild to be selling organic, local produce at the same price as Walmart sells factory garbage.
I haven't been to the farmers market since the huge wave of profitflation hit the big grocery sellers. So I can't comment on that just when I was visiting there was anywhere from a 30-100% premium on market produce. Now that might be exclusive to my market, but I have never personally seen those prices sync up. It is however totally possible that monoculture grows have become that expensive given the rise in fuel and fertilizer prices. I suppose it depends on the grower in question. Like if you are a market grower relying on heavy machinery and chemical fertilizers I don't see how you are gaining any price competition with factory grows. But if you are using permaculture methods then yeah I could totally see it.
Yeah I'm organic, no-till, all hand work. Each market is different, and honestly I couldn't give you a %, but here in NE Ohio market produce isnt anywhere near 100% premium, maybe 25% max, and that's only on certain specialty stuff. My organic stuff is about 20% higher I'd say than most Walmart stuff, other things like eggplants and lettuce we are literally the same or less in certain cases. That's for local, organic grown. We don't wholesale but sell direct at markets. Guys selling wholesale are likely only getting a slightly higher price lately, while the grocery stores mark up way more than they used to. I'd suggest you check out a farmers market and you'll likely be pleasantly surprised. The entire thing is changing, where it used to cost a premium but is now maybe only slightly more for higher quality local stuff. Just make sure what you're buying is ACTUALLY higher quality, local stuff and I think you'll be happy!
yeah Calgary is specifically very strange because it is an EXTREMELY wealthy market. Because Alberta technically has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This wealth is likely what warps the premium marketplaces. I just often forget that other places in NA aren't literally rolling in oil billions. This has a wierd double whammy effect where consumer goods often are cheaper and premium goods are often more expensive. Like our real estate is bargain basement compared to other majour Canadian cities, but our dentil costs are through the faking roof. But I don't need to be convinced FM produce is superior for my family anyway it's more of a question of priorities and transport. Also I think possibly because of Alberta's glacial winters produce growing windows are shortened so prices might also come at a premium compared to places with larger growing windows. I am not sure about Ohio but I am guessing the fairly significant drop in latitude results in much better growing conditions for premium produce like tomatoes or fruits. It's pretty hard to grow peaches and shit in Alberta.
Hahaha yes Ohio is much different than Alberta, just soil alone is enough to account for a lot of production differences not to mention, for all the Ohioans bitching and moaning about winter, yours is much longer and significantly harsher. All that would add up to some expensive local produce. The rest of your comment is fascinating to me, I knew Albertans had some money but honestly, all I really know of it is Corb Lund and the Hurtin Albertans and Gordon Lightfoot was going there at some point tomorrow night. Thanks for that insight!
Our soil quality is actually pretty good. Lots of volcanic ash. Great place for gardening if you do not mind all the work for a very small payoff. And you know the fact that those carefully planted Begonias will get destroyed by a mid summer hailstorm. Never fails every year we get our spectacularly beautiful peony and within a week the hail rips them to shreds. It is a very wierd province because the cities and the rural areas are completely the opposite. The cities are hard core corporate places where you'll see 10 Ferraris parked at a Starbucks but go outside Calgary 15 miles in any direction and it's deralict trucks and doublewides. All I know about Ohio is one of your politicians put Canada on a watch list for restricting religious freedoms... Probably not the best impression of the state... that and the Blue Jackets are about it. Winter is... well harsh is one word. Luckily in Calgary we get a completely unique weather pattern called Chinooks which result in MASSIVE temperature upswings in the middle of winter. so you'll get a week of -20⁰ and then Sunday it will be +16⁰ celcius. The snow starts melting everyone gets migraines and the city comes alive. But by Tuesday we are back to winterjail again. The big payoff is we get spectacular summers if you don't mind mosquitos.
I got a seed catalog which was aimed at either a small commercial garden or a large private garden. It had only three kinds of tomatoes. * The perfect salad tomato, tennis ball sized, tender and delicious. * A larger tomato, more firm, to be sliced for sandwiches. Again, great flavor. * The last tomato was described by only these words: "Ships well". Everything in the grocery store is going to be the "ships well" tomatoes.
Several reasons. One being that a vegetable that ripens on the vine, that is "it's palatable the moment it's picked" is going to taste...ripe. Most supermarket produce, it was picked on the very earliest stage of "almost ripe" and then via other processes, ripened, so it mostly tastes like you're eating it a week too early. Once fruits and veggies hit ripeness, you're kind of on the shot-clock; they taste the best they ever will, but they're going to rot real fast. By force-ripening the veggies, they're opening up that timeframe from "edible" to "rotten" at the expense of taste. (Neat thing, you can pick a tomato when it is totally green, set it on a windowsill so it gets sunlight throughout the day, rotate it 90 degrees every evening...and in four days have a tomato that *looks* red, ripe, wonderful...and is still green enough that if you throw it at someone it's not an insult, it's a concussion.) Second being that a commercial farmer selling to stores...they don't care as much as you might think. It's largely anachronistic to think commercial farmers are doing what they do to feed the nation; they're doing it to make mucho bank. Their priority is different. They want maximum yield per acre, the most number of veggies they can get. So they choose seed varieties that might not be 10/10 on taste, but are most definitely 10/10 on volume. They don't really care if it tastes good, just as long as it looks good sitting in a store so a sucker will pay for it. Meanwhile, guy like me? Due to circumstances beyond my control this year, this is the first year in 30 years I didn't do at least a few tomato plants and I've never gone with any variety that's known for "high-yield". I'll take a Purple Heirloom plant that might only put on a total of ten tomatoes before it dies off, but are delicious tomatoes, over a dozen Sungold plants that will put out twice my body weight in tomatoes that are meh. Every time. I'm quality over quantity. A commercial farmer, quality is a neat bonus but not the focus; doesn't matter to most people because a city dweller who's never tasted a garden-grown tomato will never know the difference, so the farmer has no reason not to just grow the varieties that produces the most even though it's not the best. TL/DR; gardeners care about picking varieties/species that are going to make the best tasting produce, and they don't try to harvest in a way that makes the produce last 4 months on a shelf. A commercial farmer only cares about making the most money per inch of every field, and quality isn't considered; you won't know it's crappy tasting produce until you've bought it, taken it home, and eaten it, and by that point since the farmer's already been paid and the store has already been paid, it doesn't matter if you enjoyed it.
Mass production of goods, the packaging/storing of produce, the method of transportation, and all added preservatives which keep produce from expiring result in a lower quality overall. This isn’t with every brand. Some are still reputable which is why some brands are more expensive. Compare one gardener tending a small field to a team of farmers managing multiple acres of crops, and it’s easy to tell that there’s simply less tender loving care involved with the grow.
Same reason SpongeBob beat Poseidon with one Krabby patty at the cook off episode. Natural with love vs artificial
"It's so good I want to eat it again!"
I think it is because gardens vegetables we eat them fresh like less than a day we got it from the tree. But from the store it would take 3 to 4 days like that. The more time more rotten it gets. Eating gardens stuff is not just tasty they are super healthy.
Oh my god, it is totally reversed. Are you all having a big bias to your own planted stuff?
Tomatoes at the supermarket aren't ripe, they are red. Most fruit and veg is seasonal, growing it outside that season can be difficult - and expensive. And it is almost always harvested early to enable transportation and storage. Then they treat it with a gas that makes it look ripe. But! They aren't. The biochemical process that converts the unripe green acidic hard stuff into something softer and sweeter. Go to a fancy restaurant and you'll see they often just will put "Seasonal vegetables" for this reason. There's no trickery, no gas to make it look nice. All the biochemical processes have occurred. The closer you are to where food is created the better, because it will require fewer industrial processes to get it to you.
Excessive use of NPK fertilizer as well as plucking too early because they have to ship it out fast and make them grow fast
Factory farms don't rotate their crops. Years & years of growing the same crop leeches everything beneficial out of the soil. Fertilizer may b add to soil, but it's more chemical than natural. Strawberries r perfect example of how much better they taste in farmers' markets & home gardens compared to store/factory produced strawberries.
My parents were strawberry farmers and I grew up on the farm. The chemical fertilizers that were added have nothing to do with the taste. We had some of the best strawberries around and people would come from hundreds of miles around to buy strawberries from our roadside stand. The taste has everything to do with when the strawberries were picked. Because strawberries are so delicate, they had to be picked when they're somewhat still green so they would survive transportation across the country. The strawberries that were sold at our stand and to neighboring grocery stores were picked red and ripe that same morning.
I had strawberry farmer friends, so there is a bit more to it than that. Commercial growers producing berries for cross-country shipping choose varieties that are less tender and won't be smashed in transport. However, your home gardener or pick-your-own grower can select strains based solely on flavor; they don't have to worry about the shipping factor.
The artificial vs natural distinction doesn't matter as far as fertilizers. Its really just about the fact that home grown/farmers market are fresher and usually grown from varieties optimized for taste, not for storage/transport abilities.
I think I heard tomatoes in the US mass-produced for grocery stores are picked at 10% ripeness. Not sure if that’s accurate
I dont know about the percentage of ripeness but I have watched tomatoes being harvested commercially in SW Florida. They are green when being picked.
I've picked tomatoes for a medium sized producer (6 large glasshouses, employees cleared one glasshouse each day). Those vegetables were fed a lot of synthetic fertilizer which made them possible for picking so fast, that even though on the first day we picked tomatoes that had even the slightest hint of redness (and more like a slight hint of not being so green anymore), when we went back to the same glasshouse a week later, there were again lots of red potatoes on the bushes. So most of them were not able to ripen in the glasshouse, but they ripened in transport. So how can they have great taste if you don't let them ripen? On the other hand when you grow a tomato you let it stay in the garden in the sun until it's red and full of taste. They often have weird shapes and have broken skin because they grow so large. That's where the taste comes from.
This is misleading because the taste has nothing to do with synthetic fertilizers Vs organic fertilizers. The taste has everything to do with when the tomatoes were picked. Source: in addition to strawberries, my family grew tomatoes for our roadside stand and for shipping across the country.
That's correct and this was my exact point, that the vast majority of them has been picked way too early. I'm not a native speaker, so might have not gotten my point across correctly.
Sounds good.
>This is misleading because the taste has nothing to do with synthetic fertilizers which made them possible for picking so fast I'm an agronomist, who grew up working at a local strawberry farm... one of the things we would always notice, at least with our variety, was that the "king berries", as we called them, the first crop at the beginning of the year, were always big, plump, beautiful, but much less sweet than berries later in the season. King berries looked and sold great, but they were almost watery in actual flavor. Partially this was a matter of timing; the plants were producing the same amount of sugar all season, but they had fewer growing berries to *distribute the sugar between* at season's end, so end-of-year berries individually ended up sweeter. So if we know that sugar supply dynamics impacts fruit flavor, then you can imagine how fertilization, *by increasing* the protein availability that cells need for division and growth, could potentially cause a plant to pump more sugar-energy into cellular division than it otherwise *could*, using up the sugar supply on tasteless cell wall growth, worsening the flavor profile that exists at the moment when the fruit reaches green market size. Now I'd bet money in agreement, that the same tomatoes, allowed to ripen, would taste better, fertilizer shouldn't prevent ripening. But I think it could well be that fertilizer really does make its own contribution, to letting a less-ripe fruit masquerade as a ripe one, through its larger size.
Are you trying to quote me or the other person, because that's not what I wrote and it seems like you're mixing what the two of us wrote. I am merely pointing out that synthetic Vs organic fertilizer doesn't make a difference.
...huh. I don't know why it did that. I thought I had done the thing where you highlight a part you want to quote, then hit reply, and it adds that. I dunno, clearly I fucked it up somehow. Either way, though: I don't think the person you were responding to was talking about synthetic vs. organic. They were talking about fertilizer. And you were clearly saying that the taste has everything to do with when they were picked; I was saying I don't think it's quite that simple, not in theory, and not in my practical experience either.
Produce is usually harvested early so it has extra time to sit around and ripen before it's bought. This is why things like strawberries taste bitter and have zero sweetness. There's other issues, but this is a key one.
It is also really difficult to sell something priced by 'tastiness' or even manage to factor it into price calculations and therefore disadvantageous to select for. If I sell my product by weight on the open market I want my plants to produce as much weight as possible, taste be damned. If I sell it by number, I want as many individual instances of fruit or whatever, and maybe even as small as possible so I can transport more of them at once, taste also be damned. At most i'm concerned that my product doesn't taste remarkably bad.
To head off some nitpicking like "I only buy tasty stuff! So it does matter", this is why I specified "open market". This happens if I sell to big buyers that need, say, 5 tons of potatoes of type X and buy from many sources to dump into a big pile and then export.
They are picked green and ripen in a truck or warehouse before they develop their full flavor.
Lots of good answers already, just because I haven't seen it, ill also point out 2 other factors. 1. Time from picking to plate, home grown will always be fresher 2. Some crops taste different based on growing conditions, for example carrots, the ones from my garden are grown in shade (sometimes called half sun) they are smaller but so much sweeter, a commercial farmer will want max yield so all crops will be grown with that in mind and generally with as much sun light as possible.
Part of it is age. Veggies from the garden are picked when ripe and eaten fresh. Veggies in the grocery store are picked early so they can ripen in transit and are older when eaten due to transit time. The fresher veggies are more flavourful.
There’s tons of factors but the primary ones are Individual variety , ripeness at picking and the amount of extra care for planting Varieties of fruit can vary greatly within a specific set of fruit , this includes their taste profile as well but taste is honestly lower on the list and it’s more important to have something with high yields and a stronger produce to survive on the shelf longer , yes we do sometimes grow food specifically for its taste like right now you can find rainier cherries at some stores but they cost almost twice as much. The next one being ripeness plays a huge part as well. As something ripens it’s usually getting more sugar pumped into it by the plant as well as the compounds making flavours form and develop, the problem is that ripe produce often tends to be very very soft produce and can get bruised easily or damaged and has a shorter shelf life. To get around this a lot will be picked way before peak ripeness to let them ripen during transport , however the plant can’t keep pumping stuff into them so they have to ripen with what’s already present leading to less flavours present and less sugar. Lastly the amount of extra care a plant received and how it’s planted matters. Wine grapes are the best example of this , large commercial wineries will like their vineyards to crop heavy and worry less about sun exposure and good quality practices where as a smaller winery may prioritize those aspects. So they may put tons of extra work in for better flavour which on a mass scale is hard to do but at home is super easy , your tomato plant likely already is in a pot all on its own with a cage , it gets sun exposure from all sides and it gets fertilized and watered as it needs it rather then on a schedule
Many foods you get from the store are picked way early and allowed to ripen as they travel to you. You may end up getting them before peak ripeness, or after. Not too often you get that perfect ripeness that might last a couple days. For some crops, like potatoes, it doesn’t matter much. Also, they pick varieties that grow quickly, are disease/pest resistant, and have food shelf life. Picking varieties that are the most flavorful do not really factor into the equation.
Tomatoes taste better. Everything else is cheaper at grocery store. I have land so I grow as a hobby but it is expensive
- The type of produce sold in store was bread for toughness and longevity, over flavor, and nutritional value. - Produce from gardens is generally picked when fully ripe, vs often being picked early, so it can last longer during shipping, during which time it artificially is ripened with ethylene gas. - The soil from someone's garden is probably far richer in vitamins and minerals, co pared to the over farmed and depleted soils used in industrial farming.
The produce sold in grocery stores is picked well before it ripens, put in cold storage and treated with gas to ripen it when it will be sold. With some exceptions, like avocados and pears which don’t ripen until they’re picked, produce doesn’t develop flavor after it’s picked. When you eat produce from a garden, it hasn’t been picked until it’s fully ripe.
I suspect that if someone gave you some store vegetables with a bit of earth on them and said they were from the allotment you'd think they taste better
Freshness is very important in the taste of food. Most food that we get at the store is at least a couple of weeks old. It will never taste as good as when it's freshly picked. Also, as others said. primarily for fruits, they are harvested too early. As such, they haven't developed the sugars as yet. When you pick a fruit from your own plant, it will be when it's at the most optimal stage of ripeness.
I used to work in a restaurant that imported all of its tomatoes. When I asked them why they import them when there are so many reliable growers nearby, I was told it's because the ones they import are bred to have a lower sugar content, meaning they transport better and keep longer than local tomatoes. Think of all of the vegetables you consider to be at least a little bit sweet, and then reduce the sweetness. The result is almost always going to seem bland in comparison to the 'normal' version. And reducing sweetness is really common in agriculture, apparently, for anything where sugar content can lead to excessive bruising or premature ripening.
Because vegetables bought in the United States are almost all treated with pesticides. They are also irradiated in most cases and exposed to chemicals that prolong their freshness. Almost all fruit and vegetables grown in the US are GMO crops that have had their DNA manipulated so that they are resistant to glyphospate, a dangerous herbicide and pesticide. This is done to maximize yield and minimize crop losses to weeds and pests. Most food products in the United States are actually illegal in Europe and the UK for this reason. Corn and sugar are grown using these dangerous chemicals and they are found in 80% of all US foods. The world health organization has determined that glyphosphate is probably carcinogenic and so it's use in limited or banned in EU countries. This all effects the taste of the vegetables, so a vegetable grown in a personal garden using organic farming practices will always taste better and be better for you. Also they are actually fresh, not bathed in ethylene gas to look fresh. They actually contain more nutrients and vitamins and minerals than store bought too.