Anecdotally (though studies like [1] seem to confirm this), I've found that tomatoes are quite sensitive to transportation and storage. To me, garden tomatoes taste fantastic; the ones at the local farmers' market taste pretty good too; supermarket tomatoes are only good for making tomato sauce. I wonder whether the tomatoes you ate as a kid had been transported over long distances.

Also anecdotally, I haven't found any other fruit or vegetable that exhibits such a drastic contrast. Maybe persimmons, but I haven't had that many supermarket persimmons. For most fruits and veggies, I've found the supermarket ones tend to taste roughly the same as garden grown ones. Indeed, sometimes I prefer the supermarket version, e.g. for apples.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658077X2...

The varieties you see in a supermarket are optimized for industrial farming and yes, transportation is one of the things they optimize for. The tomato specifically, though, lost most of it's flavor purely for aesthetic reasons [1]. Consumers have an image of the perfectly round red tomato so all the farmers optimized for it, losing at least one critical gene that contributed significantly to flavor and sugar production.

Those varieties have mostly out competed everything else in farmers markets and supermarkets but if you buy seeds online from specialized stores and grow them yourself, you can unlock an entire universe of flavor. Personally, I've never found a supermarket fruit or vegetable that tastes as good as the ones I have grown or eaten in countries with less industrialized farming, with the exception of designer varieties like cotton candy grapes, cosmic crisp apples, or sumo mandarins (though their quality is rapidly falling as they go from coddled breeding labs to industrial scale). I don't think I've had a "proper" strawberry, blueberry, or raspberry since I moved to the United States.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1711.full

Depends where you live, but heirloom tomatoes and such are very popular at farmers markets up here, and available at the better stores. (example image from a quick google: https://i1.wp.com/www.seedtopantry.com/wp-content/uploads/20... ) Berry season up here is awesome too even in the major markets, because there's such a glut of berries that won't transport out of the region.

I suspect this will be more of a trend across the US. Every time I visit back home in KS I see more people at the farmer's market there, more stuff in the supermarkets that's trying to regain some farm to table authenticity.

As long as you're grocery shopping in the United States, it doesn't really matter. I've spent most of my life in suburban and exurban California with several years each in New York, Miami, and Seattle so I'm no stranger to farmers markets and co-ops. The difference between homegrown and farmers market is much greater than the difference between farmers market and supermarket.

If I had to quantify it, I'd wager that fruits and vegetables from farmers markets are from 10% to 20% better than what you'd find in a supermarket. Co-ops can be as much as 10-50% better but growing it yourself with proper varieties is easily 200-300% better, especially here in California. Tomatoes with so much flavor that you can taste them through a tablespoon of ranch dressing (not that you'd ever need anything more than a splash of olive oil and a dash of salt with home grown vegetables).

I've also come across an article in a Swiss newspaper according to which supermarkets prefer tomatoes varieties that have a "consistent" taste all year round – and because you obviously don't get extraordinarily tasting tomatoes in winter, this then means mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round instead.

(So are they afraid that if they start selling truly delicious tomatoes in summer, they will no longer be able to sell mediocre tomatoes in winter?)

Something similar happened to the Red Delicious apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious#Selective_breedi...

It's because supermarket tomatoes are picked green, stored cold, and artificially ripened with ethylene gas.

You may be right, I recently (a few years ago) ate garden tomatoes that my mom had planted and they also tasted amazing, so that tracks.

Engineered genetic mutation that grants supermarket tomatoes mechanical properties of a tennis ball and making them always red (instead of normal green to red transition) is also responsible for the lack of normal tomatoe flavor.

Tomatoes are particularly egregious. There are still tomatoes that taste good, but you won't find them in most grocery stores. Scientists are working on some genetic engineering to make a tomato that's mechanically strong enough to withstand commercial growing and shipping, but still tastes good. In the meantime, you have to search for real tomatoes at specialty grocery stores and farmers' markets.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-do-uk-tomatoes-taste-bad

I've found good quality tomatoes are widely available in standard grocery stores (they all seem to have the same kinds - I'm guessing they have the sam suppliers). Not as good as you get in France or Italy, but significantly better than you get in supermarkets. If you are stuck with supermarket tomatoes then the premium, small/cherry ones are usually the best and well worth the extra money.

Yes, I used to love tomatoes from the local greenhouse. The sorts we get now just taste and smell fresh cut grass. For the farmers it's about what species of tomatoes grows the fastest and largest, with least work. However this is usually the least interestingly tastewise.

The tasty plants still exist, you just have to find the right sorts. They won't be found in your local grocery though.

Growing my own tomatoes this year has made grocery store made those grocery tomatoes seem like fake tomatoes that have no flavor. The small cherry ones in the plastic boxes are at least sweeter a lot of the time.