7 ms·

Why supermarket tomatoes tend to taste bland

• 6ren 14y ago
  I asked a tomato farmer about this once, and he said that supermarkets only buy varieties that transport well without bruising; taste is secondary.
  • simonsarris 14y ago
    That seems too bad but ultimately reasonable, as it is the eyeballs that select the tomato, to the mouth's eventual misfortune. People of course would prefer tasty vegetables, but I imagine that one of the most common (if not the most common) reason after pricing that people do not shop at supermarket X is that "the produce looks like shit there." If that's at all a differentiating factor, well, this is what we get.
    • euoia 14y ago
      If it is a matter of bruising then it would ultimately effect the taste as well - or at least the mouthfeel, which is arguably part of the taste if you use the tomato in a salad rather than a stew. Perhaps the solution is simply to educate consumers better.
• nathan_long 14y ago
  Another problem is shipping. A lot of produce is picked before it's ripe, because unripe fruit is less easily damaged during shipping. This is a simple reason to buy local produce: if it was picked ripe, maybe today or yesterday, it will taste better.
  • MrFoof 14y ago
    Merlin Mann and John Gruber had a pretty good discussion of this (and many other things) in "The Banana Window" episode of The Talk Show. http://5by5.tv/talkshow/57 http://5by5.tv/talkshow/57
  • euoia 14y ago
    On this topic, I am sure that many tropical fruits taste so much better when you eat them in their native setting. Mangoes and papaya are the first two that come to mind. I have never had a good papaya in England or in Canada and yet, in the West Indies they are one of my favourites.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    Growing tomatoes hydroponically, in greenhouses, all year round, then picking them early, and then shipping them (from Holland to US?) seems really weirdly sub optimal.
    • jodrellblank 14y ago
      It's optimising for some metric, just not the one you care more about.
• pka 14y ago
  Coming from Europe, when I was in America (CA) 3 years ago I was shocked that supermarket tomatoes just didn't have any taste; literally, they tasted like water. When I tell my friends about this they think I surely must be exaggerating. Yeah, industrial tomatoes here in Austria don't taste like real farmers' tomatoes either, but it's not comparable to the situation in the US. All this somehow reminds me of Soylent Green. Hope our children don't end up not knowing what real vegetables / fruits taste like.
  • kalleboo 14y ago
    There's definitely several grades of taste. In the U.S. I've had massive, red strawberries. They look gorgeous. But they taste like water compared to the comparatively "ugly" ones back home in Sweden. But then I pick an orange off a tree here in Greece, and it's unlike any orange I've ever eaten. Eating an orange is like drinking a glass of freshly-squeezed juice, only there's no need to add sugar or anything. Of course, to get Oranges up to Sweden, they need to be picked early, and they get to ripen in the back of a truck... And then we have the modern expectation of being able to get anything out-of-season, I'm sure that also causes farmers to pick breeds that grow well, but taste less.
  • ido 14y ago
    Interesting, I've been living in Vienna for more than 7 years now and didn't notice the fruits and vegetables tasting any worse when I visited Atlanta, Georgia. They did cost more than here in Austria tho, which surprised me (I assumed everything consumable would be cheaper in the US).
    • pka 14y ago
      Yeah, I was overgeneralizing - what I meant were industrial Californian tomatoes. The taste is probably much better in other regions of the US. Also it probably depends on what chain you buy them from - it wasn't Walmart but it was still some big retailer iirc. If you buy tomatoes from Hofer here they won't taste very good either (but still a lot better than the ones I had in CA).
      • 14y ago
• its_so_on 14y ago
  ha - this was published in Science. This is serious business. You could win a McNobel in Tomatorie.
  • its_so_on 14y ago
    People, this is about whether tomatoes taste bland! From the article: "But the new study, published this week in Science, found that the mutation that leads to the uniform appearance of most store-bought tomatoes..." If you don't get it, Science, like Nature, is extremely prestigious (for a general science journal) - Nobel territory. :)
• cbr 14y ago
  The problem is that we've been optimizing for food that looks like it will be tasty instead of food that is actually tasty: http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-02-16.html http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-02-16.html
• turar 14y ago
  Barry Eastbrook has a book "Tomatoland" [1], about the taste of tomatoes in America, which is based on his earlier article [2]. Also there was a good interview with him on NPR [3]. Tomatoes are grown for easy transportation, and appearance, not for taste. They're harvested while still green, and then treated with ethylene gas, which "colors" them in an attractive color, but doesn't add any taste. 1. http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Destroyed-Alluring/dp/1449423450 http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Dest... 2. http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-th... 3. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=137371975 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
• elorant 14y ago
  In US as in most developed countries it takes four to seven days for vegetables to reach the supermarket shelves. That's why supermarkets seek crops that can last longer while taste is less significant. Furthermore, all fruits and vegetables taste good when they're in season. Tomatoes for example are in their prime condition from July to October.
  • deleted 14y ago
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• cstross 14y ago
  Here in the UK, I've got two main sources of tomatoes: supermarkets, or the local once-a-week farmers' market. At the supermarket, they tend to be packaged. At the farmers' market, they're on display loose or on the vine. I don't buy by colour: I buy by smell. No kidding -- the tomatoes on the vine bought from the speciality farm stall smell utterly different to the supermarket variety; a pungent, 'green' scent that you can pick up by sniffing the vine. The supermarket variety, even vines of tomatoes, barely smell at all when you get them out of the packaging. And smell is a major component of the human sense of taste, conveying many of the nuances of flavour. Is supermarket over-packaging actually an attempt to disguise the lack of aroma of foodstuffs by forcing customers to evaluate by sight rather than by the more obviously applicable sense?
  • elorant 14y ago
    Is supermarket over-packaging actually an attempt to disguise the lack of aroma of foodstuffs by forcing customers to evaluate by sight rather than by the more obviously applicable sense? Yeap. Speaking about tomatoes for example, organic ones never look quite red, they have a yellowish look on them.
    • excuse-me 14y ago
      It's one of the big problems for fancy organic type supermarkets. People associate organic=good and healthy=perfect and pretty, but in reality of course it's the opposite. So one of the reasons fancy organic supermarket produce is so expensive is that they hand sort and pick the prettiest pieces.
      • jlmendezbonini 14y ago
        >So one of the reasons fancy organic supermarket produce is so expensive is that they hand sort and pick the prettiest pieces. Very interesting. Do you have some good sources so we can read more about it?
  • euoia 14y ago
    I think - no evidence to justify this - that you're just smelling the vine. The vine and the leaves of tomatoes smell really strong. I bet if you took one of the vine tomatoes off the vine, washed it, left it for a few hours, you wouldn't be able to smell that smell any more. I have considered whether the leaves of tomatoes are edible, they do have such a pungent smell. I was told they are poisonous. I could google it, but would that not ruin the fun?
• droithomme 14y ago
  "researchers have discovered one reason why: a genetic mutation, common in store-bought tomatoes" This reason stated in the article is not the primary reason. Store tomatoes are picked hard and green so they will not be bruised during transport. They are then sprayed with nitrogen before being put out so that the skin turns orangish and looks sort of ripe. But it's not ripe, and won't ripen properly since it's a green tomato that was picked long before it was ripe. You can grow the exact same varieties that they sell at the store and allow them to ripen and they will taste considerably better than store bought. This shows that the popular hybrid varieties are not the primary cause of the taste and texture problems. Yes, some varieties of heritage tomatoes will taste even better, due to genetics. But the overwhelming primary issue here is the picking when completely non-ripe. source: decades of growing tomatoes
  • qwert321 14y ago
    >They are then sprayed with nitrogen before being put out so that the skin turns orangish and looks sort of ripe. Stores spray the tomatoes with Ethelyene gas. Not Nitrogen. The difference matters here. Ethelyene gas is naturally produced by tomatoes and other fruits that ripen after picking. This gas catalyzes the ripening process. In nature, ripening happens relatively slowly because the gas is excreted into the open air. In a supermarket, this gas is given in much higher doses than would happen in nature, accelerating the ripening process. This turns the tomatoes red, but because it happens more quickly the sugars in the tomatoes don't have as much time to fully develop which is the main reason home-grown and ripened tomatoes can taste better. However, as I explained this is still just an accelerated version of a natural process. You can do a smaller scale version by sticking your tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple (apples produce a lot of Ethelyene gas) for a couple days. The article is describing tomatoes that theoretically taste even better than home grown varieties, which still have similar genetic makeup to supermarket variety tomatoes.
• warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
  "Suggests," "tend to!" Insultingly soft-pedaled article! Supermarket tomatoes are horrible. If left to ripen, still horrible. Is there no one left who remembers what a tomato tastes like?
• jinushaun 14y ago
  The real shame is that supermarket tomatoes train an entire generation to hate the taste of tomatoes. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that opt for "no tomatoes" when eating out. Tomatoes are that annoying mushy pocket of water in your burger, or that mealy texture in your sandwich. That's unfortunate because vine-ripened tomatoes are deliciously sweet and tart--there is no confusion about whether it is a fruit or vegetable.