we have a small community garden in which we grow some fruits and vegetables in the summer, including tomatoes, strawberries, carrots, cucumbers, apples etc, some of these plant species are many decades old and they taste amazing
if you compare these to their commercially sold counterparts, you’ll find that the latter are very watered down, rubber-like, overgrown substances, optimized for transportation and storage, not for taste, and taste as though someone verbally described their taste to an alien, who later tried to reproduce it from scratch and added too much water
strawberries, blueberries and tomatoes have been hit the worst in my opinion, it’s so bad that I try to avoid these as much as possible
I observed this trend everywhere I’ve been, and what worries me is that a ton of people may be unaware that all of these things actually taste amazing in their “conventional” variants, plus due to their seeming unpopularity these species are starting to slowly disappear
anyone else notice this?
The increasing amount of Carbon Dioxide is making veggies less nutritious, and making them generate more sugars. I’ve seen stories about it occasionally over the last 10 years, but it doesn’t seem to be catching much public attention.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-global-warming-make-food-less-nutritious/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warming.html
Here is another article Effects of Elevated CO2 on Nutritional Quality of Vegetables: A Review available from NIH
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6104417/
Of the many real existential dangers CO2 poses to life on earth, it doesn’t seem like plant nutrition is one of them.
Could be because industrial farming drains the soil of nutrition and synthetic fertilizers are not enough to replenish the replenish the soil properly.
Idk just speculating here.
Soil quality does seem a big factor. It would be interesting to see if a community garden with poor soil still outperforms commercial in terms of taste and potency
and the power of seed monocultures that are relatively simple to market (due to their appearance) and scale production for than their conventional counterparts. the former is replacing the latter due to the imposition of free trade across continents, destroying the indigenous, tastier (but also more perishable?) seed varieties.
Blueberries for sure noticable, in the size of the fruit sold. We go picking blueberries from a small farm and the fruits are big and juicy, while the ones you’ll find in the stores are often small and sometimes taste like dirt. Tomatoes too, but their texture is too soft or too firm, depending on the size.
Yea. I had a friend once bite into a blueberry that had actually been allowed to ripen. She was confused that the blueberry was sweet…
Picking fresh berries should be a prerequisite to eating them 😂
To be fair, it’s also due to the consumer demanding less perishable products with a shelf-life similar to other products. Saves you a trip to the supermarket if you can buy everything in one go, instead of having to go more often just for the fresh items. Since people are getting more aware of healthy diets and eating fresh more often, the market has adapted to that by offering more for those who want veggies, but don’t really care about quality (or don’t know the differences).
It’s also hard with the rapidly shrinking time available for shopping, etc
Today’s commercial varieties are definitely bred to be easy to transport and look good a long time in a supermarket, but at least for tomatoes it has gotten better. 20 years ago or so the tomatoes sold in supermarkets were definitely worse in taste.
Even the state of the product has gone down lately. I somewhat regularly find half-spoiled vegetables in pre-packaged packs
i don’t think this is necessarily an indication of the trend i described
if anything, things being more spoiled means that they are not as optimized for transport, and as such, closer to their tasty and original variants, or this could be something as simple as an inefficient supply chain, or the trend that /u/poVoq mentioned in their comment
That might also be an effort to reduce food waste. Typically a lot, and I mean a lot, like 50% of the fresh produce gets thrown out by supermarkets, so that only the good looking stuff remains on the shelves.
Lately I noticed that there are some efforts to rather discount them and/or keep them on the shelves slightly longer.
where i live they literally sell rotten vegetables way cheaper, that shit’s crazy imo they sh0uld give that away
In our region “home-grown” usually means ‘pesticide-free’ and ‘tastier’.
