If people found taste so important, tasteless vegetables wouldn't have been so successful. And it wasn't just tomatoes either; the most common potato, the bintje, and later the superbintje, are also famous for having very little taste. In my youth, this was considered normal.

During my student days in the early 1990s, I started buying organic whenever possible, and organic potatoes weren't bintjes. When fellow students came over to eat, they were stunned at the taste. "What did you do with your potatoes?" I just boiled them, nothing more. (I'm a pretty mediocre cook.) They just had no idea that potatoes could taste like that. Tasteless crap was the standard. Even when people could afford better, they didn't know it existed.