I’ve recently started buying all of my fruits & veggies from the local farmer’s market. It had been so long since I’ve had a fresh nectarine I had forgotten what they are really supposed to taste like. In fact I think the blandness of grocery store fruit was partially to blame for the exclusion of fruit from my diet lo these many years.
Why is the produce at major retail grocers so bland? Do the growers pick the fruit while it’s still green? Even the tomatoes from the whole foods market down the block don’t measure up to the ones I bought from the local farmer’s market.
Well, with my experience I can only answer for fruit (but I would suspect that the following is true for vegetables as well).
In short, economics. In tree fruit, most of the current dominant varieties (with reference specifically to peaches, plums, nectarines, and grapes) are grown almost exclusively for size and color. Every marketing study I saw while I was working in the industry showed that the consumer gravitates first towards color and then size. This has resulted in whole varieties of tree fruit that have been developed with these characteristics in mind. The classic old varieties (like the Faye Elberta peach and the Summergrand nectarine) simply cannot compete in a strictly visual sense. They may have the taste but they are particularly susceptible to certain cosmetic blemishes (like scarring and cracking, split pits, etc.) that the hardier varieties are largely immune to. So commercial farmers have pretty much abandoned many, if not all, of the old varities for the new ones which yield larger harvests, better prices, and less waste.
Growers do pick the fruit while it is still on the green side (for shipping reasons) but even if you let them ripen up they will never taste like those older varieties. Farmers markets and specialty shops are pretty much the only places you can find tree fruit that doesn’t taste like straw.
the produce in major supermarkets is often tasteless for a number of reasons, including:
-The fruit and vegetable varieties chosen have been selected for attributes like shelf-life, durability in packaging, machine handling and shipping, heavy yield, uniform size and colour, concurrent crop maturity; you can’t really get every single desirable attribute in a single vegetable variety, so in selecting the above, flavour was simply not the top of the list. Indeed some of these selected attributes are at odds with the ones that make for flavour.
-The produce is picked before it is fully ripe, again because if shipping - it might have to travel across multiple continents - even by air freight, this will be a journey of maybe a week from field to shelf; picking underripe and storing cold also allows the growers to merge several days’ picking into one shipment.
-They tend to want to buy a single, uniform product in massive bulk, this means farming it on an industrial scale and this can result in an unsatisfactory product.
-Produce is offered out of season; you can get strawberries forced under glass in January (if you’re willing to pay); they don’t really taste like strawberries, or in fact taste like anything much at all, but hey, it’s strawberries in January.
Don’t get me started on one of my well-rehearsed rants…
UK supermarket fruit and veg is lousy for a number of reasons:
The varieties are chosen for their yield, shelf life, uniform shape, and resistance to bruising during transport. Taste is low down the list.
Lots of stuff (peppers, tomatoes, lettuce etc) is grown hydroponically. Cheap and efficient, but produces watery tasteless produce because it’s grown too fast.
Supermarkets wash and dress their veg. Washing the mud off a carrot and chopping off the leaves and root tail will drastically reduce it’s shelf life, so they’re often a bit bendy, or have been chilled for a few days while in transit to keep them looking fresh.
UK supermarket supply chains are very centralised, so your carrot may well have travelled up and down the country before it reaches its destination. Even if its been sold in a supermarket sited next to the field in which it was grown, it’s gone on a great journey to travel a short distance.
I like my local vegmongers. They get in local produce in-season (Kent cob nuts today!), they’re half the price of the supermarkets, and the produce tastes of what its supposed to. No farmers’ markets near me alas.
I also grow my own fruit and veg from time to time. When that’s done well the taste is in a different league again.
I’m a member of the Henry Doubleday Research Association; they preserve the seeds of heirloom and ‘delisted’ vegetable varieties with a view to preserving genetic resources for future plant breeding programs, but they also make their seeds available to members; I’ve grown some really weird-looking, even frighteningly ugly old garden varieties of tomato from them and many were far superior in flavour to modern ‘uniform’ varieties grown in the same garden.
All of the above. But another effect which seems to obviate against decent tasting fruit is the prevailing taste for sweetness above all other flavours.
In Australia there is a new(ish) variety of peach and nectarine which have flooded the market in the last couple of years, and which have been bred for sweetness. However, decent tasting fruit (including tomatoes) really depends on a balance of acid, sweetness and other flavours. If sweetness is the dominant flavour then the fruit is bland, and to my palate, boring.
I bought an heirloom tomato plant specifically for all those ridges. They looked like the type of tomatoes my grandpa used to grow in his vast garden. Sadly, I was late getting stuff in the ground this year because I wasn’t able to plant until late April since I closed on my house mid-April, and our summer started early and even though I got lots of blooms, only one set fruit and the mockingbirds got it early.
Even my non-heirloom peppers, cukes and tomatoes, though, were superbly delicious. I just hope I get more fruit next summer. And I wish my yard was big and sunny enough to plant more things than just tomatoes, peppers and cukes. I truly hate grocery store fruits and vegs.
If you’ve got room for a large pot, you might like to try growing squashes vertically - there’s a rather nice variety called Sweet Dumpling that is ideal for this - it produces cricket-ball-sized creamy white fruits with attractive green veining, in the classic pumpkin shape, but small enough that you can serve one per person - just cut around the stalk, scoop out the centre and add a chunk of butter and bake (or microwave) until tender.
The plants will grow quite happily up a maypole arrangement of canes in a large pot or bucket.
You can also grow potatoes in a dustbin with holes in the bottom; you don’t get massive crops, but there’s no potato to rival the flavour of one cooked just a few minutes out of the soil.
The cynical side of me suspects that there has even been a deliberate watering-down of quality across the produce ranges, specifically to create a market space and demand for (frighteningly expensive) ‘grown for flavour’ products - which are often disappointing anyway - with tomatoes, the impression of greater aroma comes largely from the stalks that the fruits are left on when packaged for selling this way, not from the tomatoes themselves.
Of course, I’m sure that even suspecting this marks me as a nutcase.
There is a direct, inverse correlation between size and flavour. A plant can only produce so much flavour compounds but it can add on starch and water so long as there are enough nutrients. This means farmers can either accept lower yields on flavourful produce or high yields on blander tasting food.
I think it’s probably also true that some plants produce some of the flavour compounds in response to hard conditions (as I mentioned earlier, this is my experience with tomatoes) - the compounds that we value as giving flavour and aroma are very often present to:
a)encourage the consumption of the fruit by animals which will distribute the seeds
and/or
b)to discourage the consumption of the fruit by animals that will just eat and digest it, destroying the seeds.
So from an evolutionary POV, making more flavoursome fruit in response to hard conditions (where less fruit overall will be produced) may actually be a survival strategy.
Not a consciously deliberate strategy, of course, but in a drought year, fruits that are more likely to be consumed by the right animals are more likely to have their seeds effectively distributed.
Nope, just a rare connoisseur. Sniffing fruit and veg is often a good way of predicting flavour (apart from vine tomatoes, as mentioned by Mangetout). If that peach doesn’t smell of peach then it’s not going to taste very peachy either.
Interesting point from Shalmanese on flavour - I’ve never really thought of it that way before. Hmmm…
Part of the problem is us, the gormless consumer. We expect our fruit and veg to be nice looking and available all year round, and the price we pay for that is a bland uniformity. Consumers from countries with a greater appreciation of food (e.g. France, Spain) wouldn’t dream of buying out of season produce. Madness! It’s bland and expensive. They’d much prefer fresh, local produce grown with flavour in mind.
The only real way to get top quality produce in the UK is to grow it yourself. No competition. As soon as you pick a sweetcorn cob, the sugars start turning to starch. Mine goes from soil to pot in 30 minutes or less, and it just tastes like nothing else.
Basil in particular always tastes better if it’s been left slightly “thirsty” for a day or two… much more intense flavour with less water, and Basil recovers v. well from lack of water so is easy to revive it for more growing.
Actually, I plan to replace some of the space I used for cukes to grow some of these zucchinis. When I first bought my house the trees hadn’t fully leaved yet so I wasn’t sure exactly how much sun I would have. Not much because of my neighbor’s pecan tree. But I did have too much cuke so I’m going to add the zuke next spring!
Supermarket tomatoes in the U.S. taste like watery cardboard because they are harvested while they are still hard and green so that they can be shipped with minimal damage. They are reddened ( I won’t say ‘ripened’ because that is an insult to a ripe tomato) by flooding the storage area with ethylene gas.
This isn’t the whole story. Each fall, at the first hard frost, I harvest all the green tomatoes on my plants, and stick them in paper bags, with an apple for ethylene. When ripe, any time up to mid-december, they’re still much tastier than the storebought variety.
