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?
Even the state of the product has gone down lately. I somewhat regularly find half-spoiled vegetables in pre-packaged packs
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
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