Interesting piece in Time:
There are two pieces of late-breaking news on the tomato beat this week. First of all, tomatoes have shoulders. Second, tomatoes taste lousy. If you’re younger than 70, you probably already know about the lousy part. The shoulders are surely more of a surprise — but these are both key parts of a new study published in Science that explains what’s going on in the sorry world of supermarket tomatoes and why they taste nothing like their sweet, flavorful cousins in the wild.
It was a good 70 years ago that marketers first started catching wise to something farmers knew already: a tomato on the vine that’s uniformly light green may hardly be ready for eating, but it’s ready for picking if it’s destined for somewhere far away. By the time it’s packed, shipped, unloaded at the store and displayed on shelves, it will have turned a perfect, even red, which is eye candy to shoppers.
Not all tomatoes send so clear a pick-me signal when they’re ripening on the vine. Some have a more uneven look, with patches of darker green, particularly on the shoulders — the raised area at the top of the fruit that circles the depression where the stem attaches. Some of these might be ready for picking, but some might not be, leading to a mixed shipment arriving at the store, half of which gets left on shelves. So for seven decades, plant breeders have been selecting seeds from the uniformly green tomatoes, crossing them with other uniformly green ones to produce an über-race of perfect visual specimens. But as with other pretty things — the sea anemone, wolfsbane, John Edwards — looks can mislead.
They then go on to discuss the science of it all in great detail, but basically, it’s the same thing that has happened to red delicious apples. They’ve been bred for color instead of taste so long that they simply aren’t delicious anymore. They should be renamed red mediocres. When I was a kid, I remember eating red delicious apples that were so sweet that it would make your cheeks pucker. Now, buy a red delicious at the grocery store and chances are you’ll be biting into a very deep red mealy bland mass resembling an apple.
Fortunately, a lot of other apples are still out there, and I have orchards nearby that grow the most amazing Fuji apples ever. You bite into them and you want to cry they are so good.
Bubblegum Tate
They talked about this on an episode of America’s Test Kitchen; it was a real eye-opener. They pretty much said, “if you want things to actually taste like tomato, either buy the ugliest heirloom tomatoes you can find or stick with canned.”
cathyx
Also, they breed fruits and vegetables for longer shelf life. So taste unfortunately gets second billing to firm long lasting fruit and vegetables.
Strawberries also are a victim to this.
Tlazolteotl
I love Fuji apples. They are also delightful cored, sliced, and fried in a little bit of butter until browned.
the Conster
I have to steel myself for that first bite of an organic pink lady, it’s so sweet and juicy. Make of that what you will.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh, and as far as apples go, I’ve really gotten into honeycrisp over the past couple years.
David in NY
Odd. I think the problem with Red Delicious is that all they are is sweet (and red). No taste at all.
Demand that your grocer get some local apples in the fall — I recommend Winesaps. Crisp to the point of hard, but real taste, and they’re good all the way until about April, when most apples that don’t come from South Africa or somewhere are turning to mush.
And buy local Brandywine tomatoes.
And further, John McPhee did a terrific article on the tomato problem in the New Yorker two or three decades ago — recounts a grower dropping one from waist height, didn’t even split.
JenJen
Mmmmmm Fuji apples.
And your LOL Funny O’The Day:
Forbes: Mitt Romney Does Not Know How Venn Diagrams Work
Valdivia
when I lived in Manhattan one of my favorite things to do in Autumn was to buy apples from the farmers market– they were pretty recently picked. You could tell these were different because they just felt different and looked less waxy and tasted tart and piquant on the tongue. Supermarket apples? Not so much.
gbear
Is this more news that really isn’t news?
Southern Beale
Here in Tennessee, home-grown tomatoes are something we’ve all been spoiled with every summer. Hell, Guy Clark wrote an awesome song about home grown tomatoes. Once you’ve had some Tennessee home-grown tomatoes, the store-bought (and crap you get at restaurants) just doesn’t cut it. Why even bother.
DFS
Heirloom tomatoes just started hitting the farmer’s market this week, and already I’ve made two batches of bruschetta topping. Couple Cherokee Purples, a Brandywine, some red onion, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, basil, salt, dump it on toast, yum.
Southern Beale
Also, cross breeding? Sounds like human-induced EVOLUTION and SCIENCE.
Not possible. No wonder it sucks.
flukebucket
@Southern Beale:
That song was the first one that popped into my head when I read the post. Grow your OWN! That goes for tomatoes and a lot of other things.
David in NY
See, I think even Fujis aren’t that good, compared to actual old-fashioned apples. They’re actually half Delicious, and they taste it. I suspect Honeycrisp, but have not tried them, I think.
Yutsano
@JenJen: Willard cannot do teh maths. Or he borrowed Mrs. Suderman’s calculator.
Another Bob
Yeah, it’s the mealy part that I hate the most. Yuck. I think some of the popular newer varieties like the Fuji have been bred for crisper texture and more intense flavor. I found a variety in the past couple of years that I like. It’s called a “cameo.” It seemed kind of like what a good red delicious ought to be.
cathyx
You can’t expect produce growers to pick things at optimal ripeness and get them across the country not rotted. If you want that, you have to go local; backyard or farmers markets.
urizon
@Bubblegum Tate: Honeycrisps are incredible.
smintheus
@cathyx: Almost all fruits and veggies have fallen afoul of the ship’n’sell downbreeding spiral. And the ones that haven’t lost all of their delicious cultivars, like peaches and pears, are picked so far before they’re ripe that they never acquire any flavor. The difference between a tree ripened pear and that doorstop they sell in the market is so great you can hardly call them the same fruit.
I have a wide variety of fruit trees as well as an heirloom garden that I spend many hours keeping because I won’t settle for plastic tasting food.
Baud
Time – snarking it up!
Egg Berry
Ladies and gentlemen, your liberal media.
Valdivia
@JenJen:
thank you. that and the report that they don’t know how to translate his ads into Spanish (from TPM) totally made my day.
Violet
The first time I grew an heirloom with green shoulders I just waited and waited and waited for it to ripen. It didn’t, at least according to the “all red means ripe” script I had running in my head. I finally picked it and boy was it fantastic! I looked it up (I’d just bought the plant randomly and didn’t know the fruit had the green shoulders) and discovered the part about the green shoulders. Ever since I’ve made a point to look up new varieties I know nothing about so I’ll have some idea what they look like when they’re ripe.
smintheus
@David in NY: The original Red Delicious is a different cultivar from its now more common descendants that still use that name. It was bred and bred for shipping ability and appearance until it’s good flavor was bred out of it.
Jade Jordan
John, you really are an “EMO” dude, crying over fruit and all.
Homegrown tomatoes are so wonderfully juicy and messy compared to plastic store bought tomatoes. I think I’ll go and have a cry.
barath
A great book came out recently on the subject of what happened to Tomatoes: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.
JenJen
@Yutsano: I realize this isn’t an open thread, but since I so rarely see you:
Lord Stanley Puppeh
smintheus
@DFS: The Cherokee Purple is my favorite slicing tomato…apart from all the cracking.
feebog
My first early girl is orange, about 4 to 7 days from ready to pick. We did not plant a large variety this year, just early girls and cherry tomatos. The Cherrys have reached size, but have not yet started to turn.
Jewish Steel
@the Conster:
Pink lady is my fave too. Nice and tart. Just how I like em.
j
Reminds me of this old Guy Clark song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nitgmAInI18&feature=related
Walker
The biggest causality I have noticed over the years is watermelon. The flavorless crap they sell in stores is nothing like what I grew up on. Why does anyone buy stroke bought watermelon?
smintheus
@barath: Haven’t read the book, but surely the “most alluring fruit” is the fig.
matryoshka
My tomatoes are very good. Very good, indeed.
Seanly
I hate, hate, hate Red Delicious apples. So mealy & mushy… Give me a nice tart Granny Smith or even a baking apple.
Yutsano
@JenJen: YAY! PUPPEH!! AND THOSE EARZ!!
shortstop
@matryoshka: How lucky for me that you’re in the neighborhood. I’m going to remember this conversation.
shortstop
@smintheus: There is something very sexy about figs, yes.
James Hulsey
@Walker: “stroke bought watermelon”
I love Freudian typos!
Mnemosyne
I fell in love with Pacific Rose apples a couple of years ago, but the crop this year and last year was really bad. For some reason, everything in the stores was already wizened and gross.
I do like Pink Ladies and Fujis. I actually don’t mind Red Delicious if they’re crunchy and not mealy, but I don’t actually expect them to be sweet anymore.
Cris (without an H)
This is a great example of a systemic problem. People like to say “organic food tastes better” but that’s a demonstrably false claim in its simplest form.
What they really mean is “food grown and harvested on a small local scale tastes better than food grown for mass production and long-haul trucking.” In practice, organic produce tended to fall into the former. That’s changed — organic has become big business, so now you can get plenty of flavorless, unripe certified OG produce at your supermarket — but the term is still used as a shorthand.
beltane
The same thing that can be said about tomatoes can be said about strawberries.
JenJen
@Yutsano: Yes, THOSE EARZ!! He is so wonderful. I heart him so very much. :-)
jibeaux
I love homegrown tomato season so much I can’t stand it. I just really cannot wait. I grow them, but some of them inevitably get some nasty blight that makes me go all Hulk smash. Oh, and the heat wave has killed off every single thing I had in containers (was on vacation, but had a waterer), so dammit on that too.
David in NY
I thought that when things went into moderation, they told us so. My comments just disappear.
ETA: Well, not this one.
j
@Southern Beale: DAng! Sorry, I didn’t see your post b4 I added mine. I’ll try to delete mine. Sorry.
Linnaeus
My favorite apple cultivar is McIntosh. Sadly, here in the Land of Apples, they’re quite hard to get.
quannlace
Same thing happened to Macintosh. I’ve got an old Macintosh in my garden, and they’re nothing like what you get in stores now.
Best varieties IMHO, Honeycrisp and Winesaps. Both are only available at certain times of the year.
**********
Rutgers and Ramapo are good basic main season tomatos. The best cherry? Orange Sungold!
FoxinSocks
I’ve noticed this with so many grocery-store fruits. Watermelons, apples, strawberries…
They’re tasteless. It’s so bad that I’ve stopped buying produce at the grocery store all together. Why bother? They’re not worth the money.
I drove 15 minutes on a back-country road the other day to get to a local farm where I could get real watermelon, blueberries, and cherries. Worth every minute of the trip, even if I did almost get run off the 1 1/2 lane road by a giant SUV.
Dcrefugee
My job during college was as a greenhouse technician for a nearby USDA research facility affiliated with the university I attended. The project I worked on involved developing what were called winter-fresh tomatoes. We grew many different varieties under the same conditions, picked them and graded them by weight, size and color. We never graded them by taste. As with so much of the produce we see in stores today, the economics of production were driving the research, not taste or value to the consumer.
Over the two years I worked there, I saw tomatoes in every conceivable condition, from new flowers to decaying mush. For more than 10 years, I couldn’t eat one. I’m better now, thanks.
DCr
Chris T.
Classic example of “teaching to the test”.
In engineering we have the same thing happen: we want to figure out what makes X “better than” Y (for some set of items X Y and Z) so we come up with tests. If the tests actually work, and let us improve item X even further, eventually customers and marketing catch on to the existence of the test. Then they start wanting things that Pass The Test With Highest Possible Score, and pretty soon, we have things that merely Pass The Test (as highly as possible) and are not actually any good at their real purposes, which were never part of the test.
Edit: and this happens in medicine all the time too. It’s too expensive to test for actual cholesterol levels, for instance, so the test for your levels tests a few proxy items. Now we have drugs that manipulate the proxy items (not necessarily the actual cholesterols one cares about), and cholesterol itself was a proxy item for the real problem—atherosclerosis—and the drugs do little if anthing for that.
scav
Basically, pay attention to what you’re buying locally or growing to be sure that you’re not just replicating the bred-for-store strains. There may yet be a taste-bounce for even people growing their own tomats.
MD Rackham
Try to find a Jazz apple. They show up around now in So. Calif. at least.
Super sweet with a very crisp texture. Tastes like the Delicious apples of my childhood.
Damn do I hate mealy apples.
Cris (without an H)
@Chris T.: Behold Acid3
tones
One of the common mistakes is to refrigerate tomatoes -this should never be done.
Even store bought tomatoes will ripen decently on the counter for a few days.
Hawes
Macouns! I planted a Macoun apple tree in the front yard and a Macintosh just for cross pollination purposes.
A good Macoun is mammoth, firm and a nice blend of sweet and tart.
David in NY
@quannlace: Winesaps last longer without being mushy than any apple with real taste. I noticed that in March-April, the end of season for criap apples (not imported by air or sea), the apple grower in our local farmers’ market was charging extra for the Winesaps.
smintheus
@jibeaux: Is it the leaf spot/yellowing you mean? You can halt it by (a) pruning off low hanging branches and (b) putting down a heavy mulch of straw or leaves under the plants.
Bubblegum Tate
@urizon:
They really are. I could eat them by the bushel.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
i didn’t think you could get old enough to forget the stuff you learned when you were, like, 11. But it seems Mitt found the one person who did forget Venn diagrams, and that person now does PowerPoint graphics for the campaign.
And, speaking of the Mitt 2012 campaign, The Daily Beast (yes, I know, Megan McArdle cooties) tells us they do actually have a team of foreign-policy advisers — who spend their time being ignored by everyone else.
David in NY
@Hawes: Macouns are good too, but I’ve heard they produce a full crop only every other year.
catclub
@JenJen: That headline is an example of the media hating Mitt Romney. If they liked him they would say his minions fucked up. But since they dislike him, they say he fucked up.
Good news for John McCain, though.
smintheus
@David in NY: A new apple, the Enterprise, also lasts a long time and may get even better in storage.
Gin & Tonic
@Hawes: Yes! Macouns are the only apple worth eating.
Gemina13
Living in WA, I can pick up local produce daily. I’ve had heirloom tomatoes that made my kitchen-sink red sauce taste divine. Apples? Pink Ladies, Fujis, you name it, they’re sooooooo good. Don’t get me started on the Rainier cherries. Here, you can buy them at roadside stands for $1.99/pound, and they’re almost as big as half-dollars. And perfect.
I don’t buy supermarket produce anymore.
The Red Pen
Apples are not bred. All apple trees are cloned.
Apples are genetically diverse. If you take the seeds from a Red Delicious apple, they will grow into trees with completely different kinds of apple. It is difficult to predict, but likely they’ll all be woody and inedible because most apple trees are pollinated with crab apples (often, apple orchards are ringed with crab apple trees to provide pollen).
The original Red Delicious was submitted to a fair in the 1890’s. After it won, a farming company sought out the owner, but he could not be found. They came back the following year, hoping he’d enter again; he did and they bought his tree. They put a fence around the tree and began cloning it.
In all the time since the original, there have been mutations in the clones, so now there are 50 different cultivars, but they’re all closely related to the original tree.
This is why we must impeach Obama.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Or, if you can, get dry-farmed tomatoes from your local farmer’s market. Little hand grenades of flavor.
David in NY
@beltane:
Can you even get good strawberries anymore? I went to a pick-your-own and got some beautiful berries that had a texture, and taste, like something imported from California.
Oh, no!
Amir Khalid
@catclub:
When the crew fucks up, it’s the captain’s fault too. Because it happened on his ship, and he didn’t prevent it.
smintheus
@Gemina13: My Rainier cherry tree is easily my favorite. They’re huge and delicious, we eat them by the pound. This spring I had a massive crop until a late frost killed them all.
Bubblegum Tate
@The Red Pen:
Your punchline made me LOL.
Violet
@FoxinSocks:
I’d have to drive 45 minutes (in no traffic) even to get to an area where I could then drive on a back-country road. And even then I’d be lucky to find a farm selling produce. I either grow it myself or go to a farmers market.
Redshift
Get the good ones while you can! There was an article in the New Yorker in the past year about the development of the Honeycrisp (iirc). One of the later observations by one of the people who worked on it was that even the new good varieties tend to get redder and blander as time goes by. I’ve noticed this with Granny Smiths, which are one of my favorites. I’ve seen ones that have a tinge of red, instead of being bright green, and in general Granny Smiths aren’t as good as they used to be.
I really need to go apple-picking this fall. When I was a kid, we used to go out to the pick-your-own orchards in rural VA, and I’d get the Staymans and Winesaps, which I love.
jl
As my departed cranky grandma used to say “It’s them **** city people. They just don’t know nothing. Eat any kind of **** ****, if it’s big and looks purdy.”
Censored for sake of tender ears of Ballon Juice audience.
I notice they are inflating the berries now. Will it never end?
Best tomatoes I can get around here are dry farmed, seasonal, in the fall. Only things I can find that taste like what I could pick out of the garden as a young whipper snapper.
And around here quality of the eggplants in the store have gone south. Are the ag marketers messing with them too?
chopper
@beltane:
same can be said about most produce. few exceptions, like winter squash. and even then an heirloom cultivar tastes noticeably better.
fresh picked corn straight from the garden is incredible. mostly because the sugars start turning to crap right after you pick it, which is one reason why they’ve developed these ultra sweet varieties.
David in NY
@The Red Pen: Apple trees are propagated by cloning because they don’t breed true. But if you’re looking for a new apple, you don’t want them to breed true, you want something new. So you can do cross-breeding by controlling what apple pollinates what other kind of apple, growing the crosses, and cloning from any that are really good (some crosses will be lousy, some, maybe, great). The Fuji apple is a cross between the Red Delicious and the Falls Genet (see Wikipedia).
The Red Pen
@David in NY:
Excellent point, but in the case of the Red Delicious or similar identified cultivars, problems with it are not due to cross-breeding. The Red Delicious apples we have in 2012 are not very different from the ones you could get in 1912.
Crappy tomatoes are definitely due to breeding.
Valdivia
Not to highjack the thread but more evidence that this whole ‘I left Bain in 99’ excuse from Romney doesn’t pass muster.
eldorado
@barath: seconding the recommendation for tomatoland
jl
@David in NY: true. Actually, most tree fruits are grown on a combo of rootstock and scion. Basically, the tree part (scion) that bears the fruit is grafted onto a stump (the rootstock). Both influence the fruit that comes off. Both are developed by cross breeding, and once you got a keeper, both are cloned for mass production.
The rootstock has a big influence on size of the fruit, but can influence other characteristics.
(Edit; mainly in how much of what and how quickly the rootstock wants to pump up into the scion. A rootstock good for big fruit will pump a lot of water up quick to puff up the fruit.)
Rootstock and scion strains, and often species, are matched for a particular planting.
That is why same variety can be so different from different orchards.
So, just as much funny business going on with tree fruit as berries and veggies, where the breeders have to balance everything in one go with the whole plant.
elmo
When I was a kid in Southern California we had a nectarine tree in the backyard. It probably started bearing when I was seven, and we tore it out to put in a swimming pool when I was ten.
35 years later, I have yet to taste another real nectarine. Those hard round things in the store? Might as well be baseballs for all the taste or texture in them. I am spoiled forever.
Interrobang
I think Canada grows more cultivars of apples than anywhere else in the world, so I definitely live in AppleLand. I personally like Empires and Spartans, Spys, and Snows, although some of them are hard to get unless you actually go to the apple orchards in the fall. I vastly prefer that, but there are a million orchards around here, so most of the apples that are even in the grocery stores are local.
These days, the only way to get a good Red Delicious is to go to the orchard and get them a few days before the orchard people say they’re ripe.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I thought everyone knew tomatoes have shoulders? But then I was the one who remembered McGovern ran in 1968, so what do I know?
Tokyokie
I don’t even buy red apples any longer because of the high frequency of mealy-textured ones. I stick to the yellowish-pink ones like Pink Lady (my favorite), Fuji, Jazz and Cameo. (I have a Pink Lady and a Fuji tree growing next to each other — in order to produce apples, you need two different varieties that have overlapping blooming seasons for cross-pollination purposes — and if the grackles and drought don’t get them, I should have a crop of a few dozen apples this year.)
We bought a yellow-meat watermelon at a roadside stand in East Texas yesterday; we’ll probably eat it in a couple of days when we can share it with some of the spousal unit’s pals. I’m eager to find out what it tastes like. (The spousal unit has already started on the basket of tomatoes we got at the same place.)
Keith
My favorite apple right now is the honey crisp. Extremely sweet (but also the most expensive).
Raven
Health Reform Quiz by Kaiser. Take it and then see how fucking stupid Americans are.
http://healthreform.kff.org/quizzes/health-reform-quiz.aspx
jl
” watermelon at a roadside stand in East Texas yesterday; we’ll probably eat it in a couple of days ”
A couple of days?
I never heard of eating watermelon like that.
How does it work?
beergoggles
I can’t decide whether this is true or whether it’s yet another case of cranky old people thinking everything was better when they were younger.
jibeaux
@smintheus: I’ve researched this and I can’t find out exactly what it is, but it may be soil nematodes. They get yellowing, then browning and falling off leaves, starting with the lowest and working their way up. At the same time, they get nasty yellowish bumps all along the stalk. The yellowing leaves look like a lot of possibilities, but the bumps all over the stalk don’t really look like anything I’ve researched.
Mark S.
@Raven:
10/10!
Isn’t it great that 55% of those polled believe there will be death panels? Great work MSM!
Mnemosyne
@David in NY:
Those strawberries taste fine when they’re here in California. I’m assuming it’s the long trip cross-country that does them in.
Even the chain grocery stores stock berries that come from Oxnard, which is about an hour north of us, so they’re usually pretty good. Farmer’s market berries are best, of course, since they brought them down from Oxnard that morning.
Raven
@elmo: When we moved to LA in 1957 there was almost nothing in Orange County but. . . .Oranges!
Hungry Joe
Cosmic joke: Every year the last of my lettuce bolts right before the first of my tomatoes ripen.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned home-grown lettuce yet. Let me tell you, it’s a whole different animal. (Vegetable. You know what I mean.) Time from garden to bowl: Ten minutes. Makes a huge difference with collard, kale, and chard, too. Not as much as it does with corn, of course. Ideally, you should have the water come to a boil just as you pick it; shuck the ears as you head for the kitchen on a dead run, and heave them into the pot when you get to within 10-15 feet. Every second counts.
Every fruit and vegetable can’t be available 365 days a year and still be any good. Eat what’s in season.
jl
@beergoggles:
Good point, I don’t know if produce has gotten worse in wupermarkets. It has stunk compared to garden produce for as long as I remember.
jl
@Raven: thanks, good quiz. I bookmarking it, and am going to figure our way to make convenient paper copy for the internetless teab*gg*rs in my family.
thank goodness I got 10/10. Knowing this stuff is supposed to be one of my job duties.
joes527
I’m going to say the unthinkable. I prefer store bought tomatoes.
Sweet is a swell flavor. Life would be a poorer lot if we didn’t have foods that were sweet. But does it have the be the only flavor that crowds all other flavors out?
Most home grown tomatoes that I’ve eaten are very sweet. Very, very sweet. Pointlessly sweet.
I actually like the acid bite of a good store bought tomato. Sure there are other flavors in a tomato, and I’d be trilled to have tomatoes that are richer in those.
But not at the cost of turning it into a candy bar.
Violet
@Raven: I answered 10 out of 10 correctly. Yay me! But sadly, that’s better than 99.6% of Americans. People simply do not know what’s in the law.
Raven
@Hungry Joe: Don’t get too carried away.
Chris T.
@Raven: Jeebus, those questions are not even hard. I thought there’d be tricky ones, like, what makes any given health insurance plan “adequate” or not.
waratah
@tones: So what does my supermarket do? They keep them refrigerated. The young man told me this keeps them fresh longer.
I had been buying some on the vine greenhouse tomatoes and while not as good as home grown, not too bad with some flavor. The supermarket changed brands and now they are mushy like kept in refrigeration and no flavor.
Fuji fresh picked off the tree my favorite.
beergoggles
@jl: I can definitely agree with garden produce tasting better because it’s something I experience every summer/fall. Everything from tomatoes to brussel sprouts to kiwis taste better right from the garden but I can’t get over the nagging thought that it tastes better because I’ve been out there sweating my ass off weeding, composting, mulching and maintaining the plants.
Culture of Truth
Mitt Romney is sexy beefsteak tomato! Bland, big shoulders, also will not be elected President.
Raven
@Violet: Yea well, a friend posted it on my FB and most people I know are going 10 for 10. There is NO way that is representative of Georgia but, in the People’s Republic of Athens. . . .!
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Yes, but not from the supermarkets. Here in CA, I only buy from the guys selling them on street corners or from the farmer’s market, and there’s a couple of corner convenience/grocery stores that specialize in having good produce. But strawberries from Safeway taste like cardboard.
Also, never buy any stone fruits (plums, peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries) outside of summer/early fall. The peaches from Chile, that you get in the stores during wintertime, go from having the texture and taste of a baseball, to rotting in the fruit bowl, without ever passing through a stage where a human would want to eat them.
Apple varieties I find are really hit or miss. Sometimes I get a great bunch of Fujis or Cameos or Pink Ladies, and then sometimes they’re just mediocre. Black Arkansas are my current favorite if I can find them. I don’t find that “organic” is a guarantee of decent flavor compared to conventional anymore, and the nutritional value of organic vs. conventional is the same, so don’t see a reason to pay the organic premium except for tomatoes.
Haven’t eaten an apple with “delicious” in the name for a decade.
Blood oranges used to be great tasting, but they seem to have gotten dry and bland the past few years.
Culture of Truth
I have also been buying ones in the store from the vine. Canned? In a salad?
David in NY
@Mnemosyne: Sorry, I didn’t necessarily mean “California” so much as “far away.”
Although, I do believe that the strawberries my father grew 50 years ago were juicier and tastier than any you can find, even from your local farmer, now. The industrial imperative of firm flesh has affected most of the commercially available strains. (Though one kind, Mira des Bois, I think, that I first got at a farmers’ marked in France, is now available here and is wonderful.)
Violet
@Raven: So you travel in circles where people think for themselves. Well done!
Raven
@Chris T.: They are hard if you have your head so far up your ass you can’t see daylight.
On the boats and on the planes
They’re coming to America
Never looking back again
They’re coming to America
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I got 10/10. Less than <0.5% got all right. Jebus.
elmo
@Raven:
I lived in San Diego County from 1969 to 1996, barring a few years away in college. Every year we went to Disneyland. I have extremely vivid memories of orange groves, mile after mile for as far as the eye could see, and that being the signal that we were getting close.
scav
@jl: Except, in this instance, there’s some biochemical things going on that impact flavor mentioned in the article and research, as well as all the people tasting tomatoes here and elsewhere and noticing which ones taste better. The nobody made XXX like my mother rules still may apply. Oh, and the reason supermarkets may suck also may have changed over the years. I remember being a small Californian child showing up at Grandma’s for Xmas (IL) and wondering what the hell had happened to vegetables.
good2go
@Bubblegum Tate: Yeahhhh!
JenJen
@catclub:
Exactly. And it gets better:
Romney’s Campaign Should Heed Advice To Clean House, Starting With Eric Fehrnstrom
The conservative media has had about enough of Fehrnstrom, and they’re aiming their fire at Mitt. Since even Rupert Murdoch has thrown down on this one, I don’t know how much longer Etch-A-Sketch can survive, let alone the mockable-by-the-day Amateur Hour Romney Campaign.
beltane
@Valdivia: When I first heard the story of Mitt Romney and the fetus disposal plant I thought it was snark because it sounded like something I’d think of while drunk. But the story is true and I am at a loss for words.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Seanly:
Why can’t you get baking apples over here? In Britain it would be considered a sin to make an apple pie out of anything but good old fashioned Bramleys.
jibeaux
@joes527: Maybe you have good stores. Store bought tomatoes, in my experience, don’t taste like anything at all. Maybe, in a good store when they are in season and if they advertised as local, but otherwise, they are cardboard.
Chat Noir
@Raven: Thanks for the link. I answered all 10 questions correctly.
smintheus
@jibeaux: Yes, it’s a common disease, gets in the soil and splashed upward onto leaves, which then splash the disease upward. So control the disease at the base, esp. with a mulch that prevents splashing of soil=borne pathogens.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid:
I realize you’ve probably moved on by now but that is a cute item. I assume it means that their advisers are actually students of international relations. And probably take such things seriously. So naturally, they are to be ignored.
David in NY
@scav: One caveat about the “nobody made XXX like my mother” rule. I think when you get to my age (mid-60’s), your sense of taste isn’t as sharp as it was as a kid. I think I am aware of this from a few things like good wine — I used to think a good Bordeaux had a really distinctive taste but now I don’t sense it (even if I can afford it these days), and I don’t think it’s the wine that’s changed so much. But maybe that’s gone downhill, though I doubt it.
Svensker
@Seanly:
…
Mostly true. However, if your market gets in a fresh shipment of Red Delicious and they are kept cold and then you rush them home and keep them cool and eat them immediately, they’re pretty good. Crisp and mildly sweet, with a pleasing light apple taste.
Let them sit at room temp for just a little while, however, and they turn to flavorless mealy apple-shaped things.
My dad picked apples in Washington State during the Depression and those were the rules he laid down for R.D.s.
I love Winesaps and the old-fashioned apples my grandmothers grew — Transparents and Gravensteins especially. Gravensteins make the most exquisite cider. Not to mention applesauce.
But them’s hard to find in stores.
rlrr
@Violet:
Me too!
scav
@David in NY: That could very well be — I think I heard somebody mention during the transit of Venus coverage that the colors we can easily see changes with age (something about yellow? But I forget if it was more or less of it). Aging is more interesting in weird ways than I expected.
jl
@scav:
I don’t know much about all the vegetables, only what I am familiar with on farm when growing up.
I am sure you are correct, at least as far as California tomatoes. I know the breeders had to breed to solve shipping problem long ago, they needed a tomato that would ship on ice. Then low temp high nitrogen storage with enzyme controlled ripening came in, and tomatoes were optimized for that. And then breeding needed so a green tomato that would store and ripen correctly but could also survive the tomato picking machine.
I think customer taste also plays a role. Seems to me more of the acid and and musty and astringent flavors are bred out for a purer (or more insipid, depending on your viewpoint) sweet flavor.
I know for sure that tomatoes and relatives are less acid, which changes approach needed for safe home canning.
Carrots and some other root crops are also bred intensly for uniformity as required for efficient machine harvesting. All the commercial carrots have to ripen at same time at same height for carrot picker now.
I know also some breeding went on for almonds when machine shaker harvesting came along. (Edit: had to shake down when trunk shaken, rather than from poling)
Though most of that happened before my time, so just know about generally from the oldsters on the farm.
Mark S.
@David in NY:
I read that the wrong way at first.
Villago Delenda Est
Breeding fruit for color, not taste, makes great marketing sense. If it looks good, it will sell. How it tastes is utterly irrelevant, because, as the First Rule of Acquisition states, “Once you have their money, never give it back.”
joes527
@jibeaux: Nope. I eat politically incorrect tomatoes shipped from a factory farm in Timbuktu. Actually, I’m not quite sure where they come from, they are the ones labeled “tomatoes” in the store.
Yes I get tasteless batches that resemble nothing more than red, wet styrofoam. But more often than not he flavor is sharp and acid with a variety of more muted flavors that all say “this is a tomato.” Sure, I’d love to be able to dodge the tasteless batches, and I’d love for the balance of acid to flavor to be more on the flavor side, but in my experience, home grown tomatoes simply trade acid for sweet and let that drown out any actual tomato flavor. Given that choice, I’ll stick with the sharp flavor of store bought. I can pick the tomatoness much better under that than I can under a ton of sugar.
slag
@JenJen: OK. Now the Rmoney campaign is actually starting to mystify me. First that horrifying logo they chose and now whatever the hell that diagram is supposed to be. One of my preconceived notions about decent business people, in general, is that they could at least make things LOOK professional. They could at least hire decent marketing people.
But now with Rmoney, I’m in a dilemma. Either he never was a decent business person and it’s all been a big lie (ala GW), or his campaign’s hideous marketing is actually some sort of ploy to capture the hearts of Middle America through rank amateurism. Will his next move be an “I Have a Green Screen” speech?
David in NY
@Litlebritdifrnt: I think people don’t know what a good baking apple is. They’ll make a pie of McIntosh and it’s full of apple sauce. I hunt for Northern Spies as my farmers’ market (really keep their shape in cooking, taste good). Others available around New York in the farmers markets are Jonathans, Cortlandts, and Rome Beauties. Some of these are rarely in supermarkets, but others like Golden Delicious and Gala can be found there sometimes. Oh, also Granny Smiths are supposed to be good in pies.
scav
@jl: Well, actually, my original point was I’m old enough to remember that the vegies in Chicago just weren’t in the stores in Dec. over and above any differences in quality. As a species, we bred the scent out of roses (for a while): there’s a thought. So I’m somehow not surprised that foodstuffs optimized for ease of harvest and shipping are basically indistinguishable from the cardboard they travel with.
smintheus
@Litlebritdifrnt: Bramley apples make a fine pie, but they don’t hold a candle to a Rhode Island Greening pie. My favorite pie apples are two old unidentified cultivars in my orchard, one a large late red apple that I suspect is primarily for cider. The other is a greenish yellow large conical apple that might be a Fall Pippin; it is perhaps the world’s best baking apple, and if left on the tree very late it becomes sufficiently sweet to make a great table apple as well. I’m going to try to graft a large block of apple trees with this cultivar and make it famous.
David in NY
@slag: Have you ever read anything good written by a business person? Goes for diagrams and stuff, too. Romney obviously can’t get good artists and designers to work for him, probably because he’s got to make the final cut on everything, and it reflects his taste.
Anoniminous
@JenJen:
Kill me now.
David in NY
@Mark S.:
Me too (the XXX), but I was quoting somebody else.
Villago Delenda Est
@David in NY:
Which, from all available evidence, sucks, blows, AND bites.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est:
Early training of tree also effects color. I know of some tragic experiments gone wrong to grow apples in warmer parts of CA. Idea was to train tree young for more internal shade to protect apple from sun but get improved flavor. They were very good, but not red enough for the variety, and not marketable enough.
Sad thing for me is some of the best fruit I ever had was on family farm, samples from failed breeder experiments. They were breeder experiments that did not work out because the fruit would not keep or ship, or not ripen unifromly enough for picking, or for some trivial reason not marketable in supers. So the breeder would hand out his stock to local farmers for their gardens and shut down the project. And when the trees got old and died in the garden, that was it. No more, no place, no how.
Edit: Except when the oldster family grafting magicians were around, could keep them going for awhile that way. We had a fig tree with over half a dozen varieties of old time figs on it. That is a difficult fruit to graft.
scav
@David in NY: Hey, you two, are you maligning the XXXiness of my MOTHER? ! (My mother makes Armyboots look hot.)
beltane
@David in NY: Golden Delicious are underrated IMO. They are good multipurpose apples with a sweet, complex flavor, nothing at all like the completely unrelated Red Delicious. We planted a Belle de Boskoop tree last year. It is supposedly one of the best baking varieties in existence but only time will tell.
slag
@David in NY: I generally take a dim view of business people myself because I like to do my small part countervailing the many undeserved accolades they get everywhere else. But marketing…marketing is something any idiot who has lots of money to hire the right people can get right. The fact that Rmoney can’t even seem to do that should raise questions for anybody.
Amir Khalid
@JenJen:
At Mitt 2012, competence is a firing offense. (Remember Mitt’s former debate coach?) So this Eric Fehrnstrom, who in public likened Mitt to a cheap toy for kids, fits right in. He’s Mitt’e kind of guy because he can’t stay on the same page as Mitt’s party with the anti-HCR messaging.
A wise man (Sun-Tzu?) once said, when the enemy is making mistakes, don’t interrupt.
pseudonymous in nc
There’s a farmers’ market a way away where one of the stallholders maintains heirloom orchards, including the very lovely Black Oxford among others, and a few that make do for baking.
@David in NY:
There are a couple of orchards near SF that grow Bramleys to sell in the city, which confuse Americans but are snapped up by British expats. Not many commercial operations elsewhere, but enough people who like them that you can get hold of decent graft stock on dwarf rootstock if you have the space.
And yeah, I don’t think Americans these days have the exposure to cooking apples, so they don’t know the alchemy of turning hard, ugly, stomach-griping apples into baked delight.
David in NY
@slag: Well, that is a good point. And not entirely inconsistent with what I was saying — it’s lousy marketing (from a design standpoint) and the buck probably stops with the candidate being sold.
And look, Bain didn’t depend on marketing. It depended on rape and pillage.
Bubblegum Tate
This thread is making me revisit George Costanza’s fixation on Hampton tomatoes.
Svensker
@joes527:
My homegrown tomatoes don’t taste sweet! Rich round tomato taste with tangy acid. We grew mostly Brandywines, along with a few other varieties that I’d change up every year, depending on what the catalogs talked me into. And then we had some volunteer maters — have no idea what they were, but man oh man were they good. Huge, space-ship shape, bright red (not pink like Brandywine), lots of ’em, vigorous plant, intense tomato flavor. Yummmmmm!
JPL
@Raven: Thanks! The news media hasn’t been doing its job if 99.6% missed one or more answers. Maybe I’ll send it Chuck Todd and David Gregory. The Fox news staff would accuse Kaiser of lying.
David in NY
@pseudonymous in nc: I’d normally trust a list of baking apples from the midwest, but this one tells you in the fine print, for example, that Honeycrisp cook down too much and Granny Smith aren’t very sweet. http://www.midwestliving.com/food/fruits-veggies/great-apples-for-baking/
But for those that are aware that there are baking apples, this is sort of a standard list. I go for the Northern Spy, from Northern Michigan, where I’m from too.
David in NY
@Svensker: Brandywines are the best unless you’re after looks. They taste like tomatoes.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@JenJen: You have made my day, both with Rmoney links and wonderful puppehearz.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: Accredited to Napoleon too, but that may just be Western chauvinism.
Mike E
Local reds here in Mayberry can be good sometimes, and I do enjoy a lot of the varieties mentioned. My fave is a perfectly ripe McIntosh, like tree candy. Can’t remember the last one I bit into that was crunchy sweet, though.
pseudonymous in nc
@David in NY: Yeah, I don’t think much of that list at all, and it’s more a reflection on how I think American apple-baking recipes have evolved to accommodate the shitty selection of cooking apples. I’ve had half-decent results with Winesaps and Limbertwigs and even Arkansas Blacks late in the season, but it’s not the same. Haven’t had the Northern Spy, though.
Dr. Squid
@Keith: I got turned onto Honeycrisps in my brief time in Minneapolis, because that’s where it was bred. Put it this way, if you drop an apple and it gushes juice, it’s a good one.
Joel
This was put in the NYTimes earlier last week. I’m reading the article published in Science right now. Here’s the intro paragraph. It actually summarizes everything the layperson needs to know:
The really interesting observation is that tomato fruits photosynthesize. I was not aware of this, although apparently it was common knowledge to plant biologists. 20% of tomato sugars come from photosynthesis local to the fruit!
MacKenna
I find local organic vegetables, including tomatoes, taste so much better. I won’t buy the GMO mass-produced crap anymore. Beware of Whole Foods, though. That company is bringing in a load of bland allegedly organic produce from Mexico that tastes just like the bland crap available in Safeway.
Woodrowfan
@the Conster:
God, that’s hot….
JenJen
@Amir Khalid: No worries. I understand from the Twitter machine that Mark Halperin just went on Hardball and cleared everything up for the Romney campaign.
I’m pretty sure people aren’t joking, either. EXCELLENT NEWS FOR MCCAIN
tybee
@joes527:
home grown lemon boy will make your adnoids cringe. :)
Maude
The local Red Delicious look different than the store boughts. Same with Golden Delicious.
The Honey Crisps here are awful and sour.
Organic Red Delicious taste like your front lawn.
They sell seedless watermelons now in the store. They don’t have the flavor of the old deeded watermelons.
Wolf River apples are large enough to make a pie from one apple.
Red Rome Beauty from New York State are not around all year. They are good for cooking because the texture is wonderful. You’d want to put in a more flavorful apple with them for a pie.
The Empire apples from New York State have been full of flavor and crunch for the past two years.
Keith
@Dr. Squid: Amen! And HEB grocery stores in Houston sell organic unfiltered honeycrisp juice. I made Alton Brown’s fruitcake with it, and it was a-frigin-mazing. It is a beast to shop for it, but it’s worth it.
Bill Murray
The next big apple is likely to be the SweeTango. It’s a Honeycrip-Zestar hybrid that is good for baking (supposedly) and eating (a slightly tarter honeycrisp)
gelfling545
@quannlace: We get really good macintosh apples here in the fall. Of course their shelf life is short so we just have to eat a lot of them when they are ripe. I still haven’t found an apple to comapre with the good old style macintosh. To me, it’s what an apple should taste like.
Yutsano
Help myself, I cannot.
different-church-lady
Gee, what’s missing here… uh… ummm… oh, how about when you grow one yourself?
What, am I being some kind of weird 19th century person again?
JenJen
@Valdivia: @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): :-)
joel hanes
@Mnemosyne:
> Those strawberries taste fine when they’re here in California
I’d like to suggest as gently as I can that you should find a source of wild strawberries and try them. The ripe berries will be about as big as the tip of your little finger, intensely red throughout, and each of them contains more strawberry flavor than a pint basket of behemoth cross-bred cultivars.
TenguPhule
So in other words Tomatos are now the Mitt Romney of Fruits.
joel hanes
In re apples:
I love Jonathans. They bruise very easily, the season is short, they turn mealy in a week — but when they’re good, they’re very very good.
The Macintosh is a strong second.
Among modern varieties, honors to Fuji, Braeburn,
Gala, Jazz, and Honeycrisp.
TenguPhule
Wouldn’t know, Hawaii is watermelon country, so the fruit is local. /smug