Do you ever forsee a future focus on flavor with American fruits and vegetables?

It is already happening, with people seeking out heirloom fruits and vegetables. People realized how much is lost by hybridized produce. And once people taste good stuff, they won’t go back to the factory farmed stuff.

I haven’t bought one of those cardboard tasting tomatoes that are as soft as a softball in years. Life is too short to not enjoy healthy food. And while you say heirloom tomatoes in December, one of the joys in recapturing older varieties of produce is that you get seasonal variety that keeps you from eating the same thing year round.

I hope so. But that’s one of the reasons I garden. The heirloom tomatoes are just starting to ripen and my levels of ecstasy when I eat them can’t be described.

Farmers’ Markets are more popular now and I also learned recently that libraries have “Heirloom Seed Banks” where they give away heirloom seed packets in the hopes that people will plant and share seeds.

Not everyone can afford or has access to more expensive, more quality stuff. I realize that not all of it is more expensive but it can be. If people can grow it themselves, that’s even better.

@zenvelo: I think of supermarket tomatoes as hard, not soft.

@jca “as soft as a softball”. Ever tried to squeeze a softball?

Oh god, I die for good produce in the winter. I grow Supersweet 100 tomatoes every year. They’re a bitch to grow, they’re very thin skinned and they split after a really heavy rain, but they are so good. I had someone compare them to candy.

@zenvelo: Gotcha.

@DrasticDreamer Which varieties do you grow?

I heard a bit of a discussion on NPR where the speaker predicted that the pendulum is about to swing back the other way, and supermarket produce will begin to focus on flavor over appearance and longevity.

We can only hope.

Farmer’s markets seem to be on the down-tick around here. Price fixing, infighting and high fees seem to have taken a toll.
There’s a guy selling tomatoes off his carport for $3.50 a pound. On a 2 lane highway. In the rural Midwest.

I think to some extent supermarket produce has to focus on longevity because it has to be shipped from many miles away and be able to be packed with weight on top of it and keep for days or weeks. It’s wonderful to have produce that tastes good but not sure how practical it is for a store, which has a goal of making profit, to have produce that is not able to ship and have a shelf life.

@ibstubro Our local one is sucking out now, the guy that was the force behind it retired. But if I don’t mind traveling a bit I can find three amazing one’s around me. One even has live music.

There’s a farmers’ market in the city I work in, and I get soap from a handmade soap maker there. It’s 2 bars for 9 bucks but I’m a soap fan. They have hot food and produce there, and baked goods. I sometimes buy the produce there but I’m just as likely to buy produce from Costco.

I don’t know, @jca. Transportation advances have been amazing. I recently collected an empty box at Aldi and later realized that it was an unfamiliar size and shape. I looked and it had contained navel oranges picked in South Africa only days before. They were already on the shelf in the rural Midwest! It’s possible for there to be a contest in who can provide the most appealing produce, taste included.

I think part of the problem here is that there may be too many farm markets, on too many days @Adirondackwannabe. Spreads the vendors too thin and keeps the prices too high.

Peaches are a big thing around here, and you know what? They pick them as green as the supermarket ones. “They travel better.” Duh. “Taste the same.”

After you said that ibstubro I got to thinking, and those three amazing farmer’s markets are all in affluent communities around here. They’re all upscale markets that get a lot of traffic and the quality of stuff is amazing. Last week I was looking at some radishes, wondering how they could keep them going this late in the Summer. He shades them in the afternoon. That’s a commitment to quality. And they were so good.

@Adirondackwannabe All kinds. Brandywine, a really great yellow/orange variety that I can’t remember the name of that I’ve never had until this year – which have a salty flavor, Black Elephant, Flame Tomato, all kinds of grape tomatoes. Honestly, there’s too many to name. Nothing beats homegrown tomatoes. :) They’re eaten like candy around here when they ripen.

It’s not just our produce. My grandmother who grew up on her farm constantly complains about milk being bland and flavorless these days. She said most milk cows are Holsteins and they give awful milk, but produce a much larger quantity. I’d live to taste milk from other cows to see for myself. I also hear that pigs today are bred for gaining weight as fast as possible and not for taste. I read an article about heirloom pork farmers and not only were the pigs treated much more humanely, they also tasted much better as well.

It’s not just the breeds either. Factory farm eggs are flavorless compared to true free range chicken eggs. In the factories, the chickens only eat their feed. When they roam outside, they get to eat all kinds of different seeds, bugs, and worms. It makes their yolks a darker color and the flavor is amazing.

I’ve not heard that about milk, @keobooks.
It seems to me that pork still has more flavor than beef, beef being nearly tasteless (I don’t eat either, but from memory and smell).
I know that’s true about eggs. Thank goodness I get free-range 4-H eggs for $2.25 a dozen.

Good that you took the focus off veggies and brought it to food in general. Here in the Midwest we can find a root-source for nearly any food, in season, but even those are being homogenized.

The challenge is tasty tomatoes in December.

I have heard that about pork and poultry, @keobooks and @ibstubro. We get a heirloom turkey at Thanksgiving and it’s very flavorful. It’s from a farm upstate.

It’s hard to tell where the stuff comes from where I am, @jca & @keobooks. Most of the meat I buy comes from a small grocery chain that still has in-house butchers. I’m frequently asked if I want to buy “half a cow” or hog. I even know guys that get together once a year and ‘process’ their own meat, i.e. kill cows/hogs, cut them up with meat saws, and wrap/freeze them.