The reason some vegetables (particularly tomatoes) taste fairly subpar in the United States is because of the journey they make to reach your salad. If the tomatoes are coming from across the country (or Mexico, or another nation) they are actually picked prematurely so instead of ripening on the vine they ripen during transit. If you've ever had a tomato that tastes "mealy" this is the reason.
This mass transportation of food over long distances explains why you can get an orange any time of the year in Boston but also why the quality can be so poor - you're far away from the source.
After moving to San Francsico (from Boston with it's crazy winters) where local produce is available pretty much year-round at the local food Coop, I've noticed a pronounced different in the average quality and notably lower prices.
The advantage of vine-ripening is a myth, as I have discovered first-hand by growing tomatoes in a home garden. For optimal flavor, tomatoes should be picked when they have just a slight blush of color but are still almost entirely green, and then finish ripening OFF the vine. When allowed to ripen on the vine their texture and flavor suffer - they tend to taste and feel almost rotten.
The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.
Outdoor grown pot (for me) is way better than greenhouse or indoor grown pot. Same for tomatoes - if you have the chance, grow your own. Outdoor tomatoes are way way tastier than the mass produced industrial crap.
I think that we don't understand plants' needs at all... just let the plants grow naturally.
My default assumption is that "don't try to engineer things to be better" is the wrong answer. If we don't understand it well enough yet, just experiment more until we do. The awesome thing about indoor farming at scale is that it becomes really easy to do lots of experimenting and zero in on exactly what things each plant requires to thrive.
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
The problem is that engineering will, like capitalism, prefer at most two or three different varieties (those who were the best performers to begin with). Everything other will vanish and that's not a world I want to live in.
We already see this with Cavendish bananas and the TR4 virus. We're doomed when something similar appears for common food like rice, wheat or livestock.
Engineering will favour whatever you want it to (Diversity, tastiness, colour, shape.). It's natural selection that will apply only one selection criterium: Most surviving offsprings.
How do you think we got this diversity in grain and vegetables?
For example rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, cabbage, collard greens, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard seeds, and rapeseeds were all created though engineering from the mustard plant.
Same goes for all grain that you eat today, they were engineered from a few shitty grass species.
As for tomatoes, good luck finding a non engineered one that isn't poisonous. Same goes for almonds.
Have you seen undomesticated banana btw? Go buy some Musa balbisiana. I hope you like large pits and bitterness.
Or dogs? How much diversity have you seen in wolves? How many crazy fucking dog breeds are there?
Engineering =!= monoculture. We all agree that monoculture is shit.
But going full hippy "let's only eat what mother nature provides" is as far removed from reality as possible. Mother nature provides bitter poisonous shit, that is full of seeds, so that you don't eat it and so that it can reproduce.
It is up to man to take that and make it so that survival of the fittest means survival of the tastiest.
First of all capitalism doesn't apply to home grown diy stuff, so even if your argument was validity it would still be irrelevant here.
Secondly, even though I am very much in favour of a social state, so I am not arguing for capitalism in general here,
capitalism is pretty much a unregulated market economy.
How would you describe most societies of the last few hundred thousand years?
Socialism and everything related to it is a very modern concept. That was only made possible through the abundance of modern industrialisation.
If anything, the communist states that claimed to be defenders of socialism (I wouldn't call them socialist in any way but, meh), have shown that they were the biggest proponents of monoculture.
How do you feed a billion people through state organised agriculture? Through fields that are hundreds of miles long, so that they can be harvested easily and efficiently by a single machine.
You can still see the industrial agriculture wastelands of this philosophy in east germany today. Wind that would normally be broken by vegetation and the borders of smaller fields can erode the top soil and leaves nothing but unusable desert.
Way to project, not sure how you extrapolated all that from my comment. My point is that when a bottom line is involved, you will see only a few options come to dominance once the dust settles. And while home grown efforts do bear fruit, they very very seldom become mainstream.
A quick glance at the world of software engineering would seem to disprove this as a claim about engineering. We have the opposite problem.
Perhaps you mean that people don't want much variety and the market responds to this? Better engineering is also the answer there: the more we improve the process and reduce the costs, the easier it becomes for people to service niche markets with more obscure products. Again you can look to the software engineering world for parallels.
In a world of well-engineered food, your personal "farm" is a box in the corner, which you put seed in once a week and it spits out finished produce. The coffee machine of the farming world, if you like.
if you go to a farmer and say "this variety is more rare, but this other variety is a more safer bet", they will probably pick the latter, regardless of capitalism, or science, or engineering.
And its not like science can't produce /new/ varieties either, STEM isn't that much of a monoculture!
>Outdoor tomatoes are way way tastier than the mass produced industrial crap
>just let the plants grow naturally.
You mean that a small crop of plants, grown steps from your door and harvested at an optimal point in time taste better than mass produced vegetables? What a revelation!
Too bad that it's completely unfeasible for 90% of the global population, who live in crowded cities, or work jobs where they can't be tending to their garden, or live in environments where they can't grow produce most of the year.
Do you really think the poor and hungry on the planet care about the fact that the homegrown tomoatoes you're using in your California garden-party salad have slightly more flavour? Let them eat cake!
This attitude betrays someone who has never actually tried to raise tomatoes. It's not difficult, and rich people have no special insight into the process. Of all the things that are hard for poor people to get, dirt is not one of those. Have you lived in Kowloon Walled City your entire life? [edit: not impugning the humanity of KWC folks; just grasping at straws to imagine those without access to sunlight] No? Then you owe it to your humanity to raise some tomatoes. If you can get online you can find some seeds or seedlings. No one is born in Antarctica; everyone has a summer of some sort. Maybe you're working three sixty-hour jobs, but that means someone in your family is not. Grandma can certainly spend twenty minutes every three days weeding. Do your weeds grow faster than that? Congratulations, then your tomatoes will also grow faster.
It doesn't take a lot of land to actually live off of it. Factor about 1/10 an acre per family member. It's even less if you can trade grain and only grow the rest.
You could easily grow tomatoes, peppers or maybe even cucumbers in that space, either in pots or a relatively shallow (12cm of soil?) rectangular container. Although only if you have a sunny window.
I agree that mass-produced tomatoes seem to have been bred to also have no flavor. I'm not going to blame this on greenhouses though - there's a local family farm that produces tomatoes that are just as tasty as those from my garden but are available for an extra 3-4 months of the year. (Note that I'm in central Pennsylvania)
I'm really suspicious when americans are stating some vegetable/fruit is "tasty". Everytime I go to the US, what strikes me is the very low quality of the food products. Even in France, what I consider a shitty tomato taste better than the regular ones in the US I tried.
It's not a misplaced patriotism, it's just that I fear a lot of americans really don't know what food is supposed to taste like anymore. Which is very scary.
The same thing is happening here in Europe, but at a much slower rate. Not sure if it's reassuring though.
It's not a new phenomenon; it's actually a very old one. Much of this US food culture that you (IMHO rightfully) decry comes from our cultural heritage, which, despite our post-WWII wealth, was then a poor country. Go back a hundred years in the US and what you'll find is a country mostly full of farmers, who are mostly concerned about A: having any food at all and B: making sure they don't die from the parasites in the food, one way or another.
I was born in 1978, and I was still raised in a culture of blasting my meat until all the pink is gone, and boiling my vegetables until all flavor was gone. My influential-grandparents were both raised on a farm, which influenced what my parents ate. (To this day, neither of my parents will even consider trying sushi, because it's raw fish. That's it. That ends the argument for them. You Don't Eat Raw Meat. You don't even eat slightly pink meat.) While this may have produced generations of people with low standards, it was caused by trying to make dubious food safe-to-eat. Even today, many of our official government standards still source from this heritage, being rather excessively conservative and recommending cooking meat as if it's still full of parasites, just to be safe.
So, it's not that "Americans" don't know what food is "supposed" to taste like anymore... many of us have never known what food is "supposed" to taste like, for many generations. This isn't a situation created by "Big Food", it's a pre-existing situation that allowed Big Food to drop in, and offer Americans food that tasted better than what they were used to. That it turns out to itself have been quite mediocre is a measure of just how bad what came before it is!
The trend in the US is quite clearly upwards; I think perhaps if you aren't at least 30 right now that might not be obvious, but believe me, it's getting better, not worse. Yeah, you can still buy Doritos, which haven't hardly changed in 30 years, but the produce sections! Holy shit the produce sections. If you were presented with a produce section from 1985 you'd reach to clean your glasses, if you have them. Absolutely night and day. And the other selections too; I can't go back in time but I wonder if my mom could even have bought any sort of extra-virgin olive oil back then, to take just one example, let alone have 10 different selections.
Tomatoes are an excellent indicator of this, I think.
In the cheaper British supermarkets (e.g. Asda) or the normal range of the middle ones (Tesco, Sainsbury's) you could play billiards with the tomatoes, and they taste of nothing. They've been grown under glass in the Netherlands or (less often) England, and are bred and harvested for ease of transport, uniform appearance and shelf life.
In the more expensive supermarkets (Waitrose), or choosing the 'luxury' version in Tesco/Sainsbury's, they actually taste like tomatoes, but cost double.
Yet last time I went to Germany, I bought tomatoes from one of the ultra-budget shops and they were at least as good as Waitrose.
(Last time I went to the USA, I couldn't actually find fresh produce for sale…)
I'm no expert on French food in general, as I've only been to Paris, and just once, but what struck me most about the food wasn't that cooked restaurant food was better than what I could get in the US—sometimes it was very good, sometimes it wasn't, I had a couple really bad steaks and the second worst slice of pizza I've ever tried while I was there—but that the basic, average ingredients were as good as or better than the very best I could find at home. Produce (and I was there in December!), cheese, bread, that kind of stuff.
> it's just that I fear a lot of americans really don't know what food is supposed to taste like anymore
How can the Matrix know how Tastee Wheat really tastes? /s
That's the problem with our capitalism focused approach to food: fill it with sugar and kids will eat it, and still eat it when they're grown up and weigh >100kg and suffer from diabetes. Also, you can hide a lot of sub-par ingredients (like old meat or meat of e.g. horses) with the right amount of seasoning.
Big Food gets the profit and society gets the bill for diabetes treatment. Privatize profit, socialize risks.
I'm curious if you went to any farmer's markets while in the US, or tried anyone's home grown produce?
Personally, I keep my garden with only heirloom varieties, and they are far better than grocery stores (and even better than most of my friends that aren't as picky about their seeds).
Well, taste and nutrutional quality go hand to hand for vegetable and fruits. And eating them is the very basis of health with sleep and exercice. So it's a major health issue, even before being a tastebud one :)
We do understand it. It's just most poeple are other constraints and goals. If your goal is to make the most money, and you have a space or legal constraint, then lowering the quality is not your problem.
This seems like a no brainer-- of course it's cheaper to use inputs from freely available outdoor sources rather than metered and/or artificially provided ones. Since these plants evolved in that setting, it works rather well for them.
There are still many important reasons to pursue indoor farming. For one, population dense areas have few other options, especially in a crisis. Perhaps more importantly, space travel, colonizing other moons & planets, or even the radiation-proof underground cities we may need right here on Earth would all depend exclusively on such technology.
Seems like a false dichotomy: why not augment a greenhouse with LED lights?
For some crops, like wine grapes, growers prefer to "dry farm" or use only natural rainfall.
In dry years, however, most are forced to irrigate if nature hasn't provided enough water.
If LED lighting prices (and generation costs) continue to decline, why not "light irrigation" for cloudy climates or latitudes that don't get enough light for a full growing season.
I've learned a lot about growing plants under LEDs talking to them. In the long run space exploration will require us to do a lot of indoor plant cultivation.
Indoor farming is not good for wheat or corn, or really anything where the majority of the plant isn't fragile and/or valuable. Even if we had a mini-wheat without a stem it would be hard to compete with the outdoors. But it's great for leafy vegetables.
Indoor farming will not be cheaper, efficient, or environmentally friendly. It will be more expensive because it has to supply all of its inputs while outdoor farms get a _massive_ energy subsidy from the Sun. The amount of energy required to deliver food from a farm to the grocery is NOTHING compared to the energy we spend getting it from grocery to table; indoor farming will change none of that. It is a delusional pipe-dream from people who do not understand modern agriculture.
The article mentions that the cost of growing wheat indoors would result in an $18 loaf of bread, so there is a breakeven point. If the cost of transportation and water continues to rise that breakeven point will get closer. Saying that it will never work out reminds me of the early 1990s report that the Army did finding that if we used a tiny portion of the Mojave desert to grow Algae, the only inputs of which would be grey water from LA and sun, we could provide enough bio-diesel to take care of all of the USAs transportation needs. But they killed the project because it would only make sense in a world where gas would cost more than $1.50, which would never come.
This mass transportation of food over long distances explains why you can get an orange any time of the year in Boston but also why the quality can be so poor - you're far away from the source.
After moving to San Francsico (from Boston with it's crazy winters) where local produce is available pretty much year-round at the local food Coop, I've noticed a pronounced different in the average quality and notably lower prices.