Tomatoes available in supermarkets have actually improved in flavor in recent years, especially among grape and cherry types. Ours carries locally grown standard-sized tomatoes in summer.
Japan discovered this during the war. They made gardens in yards and public spaces such as parks but growing vegetables didn’t replace the calories lost by the decrease in rice and sugar imports. Things had gotten to a critical stage by the end of the war.
Both my parents grew up on farms during the war so they didn’t need victory gardens.
My mother had quite the vegetable garden when I was growing up. She managed to supply most of the vegetables for our family of seven.
Because the fresh-from-the-garden taste is leaps and bounds better than the picked-three-weeks-ago-and-ripened-in-transit things you get at the local grocery store.
Delicious apples picked straight from the tree taste almost nothing like the ones from the store.
Remember, there’s only two things that money can’t buy. That’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.
Hey! I sell those tomatoes at farmers’ market!
Markets vary. Some things calling themselves farmers’ markets do indeed have only the tasteless things that look like tomatoes. But some of us have the real thing.
Yeah, grape tomatoes still aren’t quite as good as the real thing, but they’re at least a reasonable substitute if you can’t get the good ones.
Plus most vegetables, if you do a fantastic job of growing them, taste just like the ones at the store.
So unless you just really like the idea of growing your own, your time is best spent growing things that either benefit a lot from growing at home (tomatoes, asparagus), or vegetables and/or varieties you can’t commonly get in grocery stores.
Homegrown is sooo much better tasting than from the store.
On the one hand, with green beans, say, the best grocery-store green beans are about as good as homegrown. On the other hand, that’s just for the best store ones, and green beans are really, really easy to grow lots of.
Huh?
No, they taste a whole lot better. At least, unless you were growing the tasteless varieties grown for large scale commercial production, and harvesting them unripe.
ETA: Yes, even green beans. I grow varieties selected for flavor. The grocery store ones seem tasteless to me.
I’m going to take a middle of the road approach here and say that in terms of quality and flavor there is sometimes minimal difference between store bought and home grown. It really depends on the crop. In my experience, there’s little difference I can detect taste-wise comparing, say potatoes or broccoli. However, there’s a noticeable difference comparing things like strawberries and tomatoes. Home grown varieties are significantly better tasting and there’s a logical reason for that. Commercially grown crops were bred based on different criteria, like can the tomatoes be machine-harvested? and how well will those super juicy and soft strawberries ship and store when they have to bump around in trucks for a thousand miles.
It’s obvious that a lot of you have never faced an empty grocery store shelf, and just think they fill by magic. During an extended power outage after a hurricane I recall walking into the store and seeing shelves essentially empty. It’s terrifying to someone born and raised in the suburbs.
The point of victory gardens was to reawaken survival instincts, to teach skills that had been long lost, and to convert millions of acres of cropland from growing fescue lawns to growing food.
For Tomatoes, certainly, a LOT better, unless you buy those heirloom tomatoes, and then some better. Radishes? Not really. Lettuce? Maybe. Zucchini- nope. Strawberries- usually. Taters? Nope.
That’s my point. If you grow potatoes, most squash, common varieties of chiles, okra, and a lot of other stuff, they taste just like what you buy at the store, for 10x the effort.
So grow the varieties you can’t get at the store, or the vegetables that are way better at home because you pick them/eat them at the right time. Fresh cut asparagus is surprisingly sweet, which isn’t something that stays around more than a few hours at most. Homegrown tomatoes are widely loved and rightly so.
I’m not saying don’t garden; but I’m saying that rather than say… growing jalapenos that are going to be just like the ones at the store if you’re lucky, grow something interesting like fish peppers, or some of the more obscure New Mexico varieties. Or rather than growing plain old Hale’s Best cantaloupe, grow those Israeli melons or the European varieties, because you can’t get them at the store.
I suspect you’ve never had a really good potato. Variety matters, soils matter, storage matters, and freshness matters — yes, even for potatoes; which are indeed a storage crop which keeps for months. And the ones which have kept for months, if they’ve been stored properly, are perfectly edible. But there really is a difference.
Though, it requires more patience than most other common garden vegetables. AIUI, it’s a perennial, and takes a couple of years (even if you grow from “crowns,” rather than from seeds) before you can really harvest much of anything.
I think today, people don’t have much experience with farming or gardening, sewing or mending clothes or even making a meal from scratch, but in 1941-45, all of these things were common knowledge, so survival instincts didn’t need much reawakening. (Even skills like building a fire from scratch or riding a horse were still known to many people.)
Ahh, my broccoli is sweet and tender. My strawberries are better than I every get at the store. My lettuce is crisp and delicate.
I’ve had fresh out of the ground homegrown potatoes. And they were… potatoes. They were indistinguishable from the ones bought from the store, except that the homegrown ones were more variable in size.
That’s true, but after that you’re good to go, and the plants themselves are silly easy to grow and maintain.
Tastebuds vary. New potatoes don’t taste to me like potatoes out of storage, and not all varieties taste the same to me.
If I’m going to prep for a possible disaster, it’s not by picking fresh radishes or zucchini from my garden. It’s by storing shelf-stable canned or dried foods in the basement.