Its a book about the incentives and technologies that came together to result in the deflavorization of food and the rise of the "flavoring" industry as a whole.
Of the interesting things in there is one guy using a mass spectrometer to identify flavor compounds at scale to engineer a tomato that is hardy and ships well without sacrificing flavor.
(Hopefully you didn't establish this throwaway account to confess your controversial tomato opinions.)
Their HN account is better curated than most tomato cultivars.
I'm more inclined to think that modern "grocery store" tomatoes are generally tomatoes that ship well while still fresh. Anything else means that tomatoes on burgers would not only be seasonal, but regulated to the sorts of places tomatoes can be shipped well from the farms.
I'm not even sure how you eat a good one daily, honestly. I've always lived in places with winter, and the tomatoes tend to lose any worth (cherry tomatoes might save you though). I used to grow or buy decent ones during the summer, but moved further north and that went away.
I think a lot of supermarket fruit and veg is picked underripe, and then ripening is induced in a controlled environment in some warehouse a few hours before it's sent to the shops, so that it's "perfectly" ripe as it's placed on display for sale.
some people mentioned looking for places that advertise using heirloom tomatos, but you still have to give them a good pinch of salt
would love to join a startup that re-engineers flavor back into commercially-viable crops
In order to ship fruit long distance, they're harvested before they're ready, and artificially ripened in frozen containers. This lets them survive long journeys but kills a lot of the taste.
So your company would end up being a traceability and logistics one - what's the nearest place to your customers that grow fruit, how can you prove it, and how can you get it in their hands.
(Last two contracts were in artificial fruit ripening and supply chain traceability respectively).
I wonder what the science there is. You'd think the slower ripening in partial shade (often a week or more slower) would result in a more complex tasting tomato, but perhaps the flavor compounds never reach a critical mass.
But tbf, only for a few months when the many small farmers grow them outdoors and sell them for unbelievably cheap.
Rest of the time it's greenhouse tomatoes like everyone else.
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: https://www.southernexposure.com/
Seed Savers Exchange https://www.seedsavers.org/
Open Source Seed Initiative partners with multiple seed exchanges: https://osseeds.org/
It's actually fascinating - I remember my grandmother scooping out the seeds out of vegetables and drying them, to be used next year.
The villagers also traded them as apparently they had different varieties.
Which leads me to wonder if its really the genetic choices or is it just something about the farming, nutritional rich soils, or transportation/timing?
- the soil plays no great role in taste but is of course the farmer most precious resource. - the plant genetics is preponderant in taste. - the consumers and farmer genetics and culture are loosely related to the plant genetics. - the missing pieces, distribution and seed providers, are the most important pieces, deciding on prices, margins and on the characteristics necessary of the products to improve those.
Local products are always best. But I can’t grow exotic fruits in Paris.
That said, it seems to be getting easier to get high quality vegetables (including tomatoes) here in the UK. It's not from a supermarket and you pay more, but it is available (maybe still not quite as good as other countries, but certainly much improved on the flavourless stuff).
I live in Hungary and tomatoes are crap for 10 months a year, when they're generally imported from abroad and are obviously picked up unripe.
Then during the summer you can buy tasteful tomatoes for a while, sourced locally.
In Italy they're better on average, but you can also find tasteless dutch ones in supermarkets (again, picked up unripe).
Recently I tried Bull’s Heart, which were stupid expensive but delicious. But you can get San Marzano in a bunch of places, and various other plum and cherry varieties with good flavours.
It’s just the average “salad tomato” that tastes like crunchy water.
The insect/worms/catepillars in my area are more vicious than rodent invasions. If you get catepillars, they can wipe out an entire plant in a day.
Maybe $15 total, plus water, time, and patience. The latter two of those can be expensive, but difficult to quantify.
[0] $10 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Pennington-12-in-Terra-Cotta-Cla...
[1] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Miracle-Gro-Moisture-Control-8-q...
[2] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Glamos-Wire-Products-54-in-Plant...
[3] $4 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bonnie-Plants-19-3-oz-Early-Girl...
That's one plant, and we're at $25.
When I grew tomatoes in containers, I went for the 5-gal buckets from Lowes ($4), and bought soil in larger bags. Also your cage is more expensive than I recall paying.
On the plus side, most of those are one-time startup costs.
Our tomatoes are self-seeding at this point. We literally do nothing except pick them, and put away several dozen jars of sauce every year, from a couple neglected garden beds. It sounds like we have less trouble with pests here than you do though.
It's a typical reaction when suggestions that gardening can be more expensive than people realize. Yes, if you use the same pots, start taking seeds generationally, etc the price amortizes to near $0. That first year though can put a dent in a wallet. If you've been doing it for awhile, it's easy to forget.
We haven't even discussed getting into drip irrigation or similar. Each of the individual parts are cheap (tubing, sprayers/drippers, etc), but again it adds up with a timer etc.
To be abundantly clear, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone, but just giving realistic expectations. It's just like getting into Arduino and what not. The controller itself is cheap. The shields are cheap. Electronic components are cheap. Then you add up all your receipts and realize, you've spent more money than originally anticipated. It's just the nature of DIY.
So, per pot, you'll spend $20 in the first year by my (updated) math, then $5-10 each successive year -- and you'll get about $15 of produce each season. Sometimes much more than $15. Cherry/grape tomatoes are expensive, and the plants are more fruitful than the larger varieties.
Drip irrigation is out of scope. A minute or two, per container, per day, with a hose (or watering can) while you check for hornworms is the operational expectation.
Anyway I don't disagree with your larger point. Little things definitely add up. I've been to IKEA!
I also dislike plastic, but I liked the form factor of the bucket (straight vertical sides) to pack multiples into a small space. I still have the buckets 15 years later, and I use them for all sorts of misc jobs around the garden.
I have determinate dwarf tomato plants (3 feet tall max), which I grew from seed ($2.99), planted in old milk crates (free) lined with plastic from old bags (free) and filled from one huge bag of potting mix (~$20-30), and this gives me half a dozen plants that are superior to anything in a supermarket. I staked them with tree branches trimmed from my trees (free).
I have grown them in the actual ground many years, eliminating the cost of the potting mix, but after a few years, you need to let the soil lie fallow to avoid blights, so this year it's the milk crate planters.
This was our first garden year. Very small plot, around 6'x6'. Deer knocked over our two tomato plants and ate every tomato off. Huge green tomatoes.
Container gardening on a (south-facing) high rise balcony works pretty well, though.
Your attitude is the problem - DONT equate $5 of supermarket tomatoes with an equivalent weight of home grown tomatoes.
I go out of my way to buy “expensive” tomatoes, because I don’t think of good tomatoes as being cheap produce, but more like an expensive vegetable (although price is still seasonal).
At the end of the day for new people trying gardening, it can be a bit disappointning. To make it all 100% magical panacea without actual realization of monetary factors, you're not being honest with potential new growers.
Perhaps a regional thing.
As a norther European, I've always found the tomatoes in the US far better than what I normally get.
Unfortunately, there is a large black market in mis-labeled San Marzanos, so it's not a full guarantee of quality. But it's something that they're at least working on, rather than just giving up.
What does that mean? Protected under what laws?
"only this company can decide who can use the trademark"
It's like:
"only if it's production fulfills certain criteria can you use the name"
It's made as a consumer protection so that people can not just claim their product is this kind of "traditional" product when it isn't. Except that it's less used like a consumer protection as it's mainly used like a trademark. Controlled by a small group of people and directly profiting some regional government/economy.
Most commonly it requires the main ingredient to come from a specific region (also e.g. used for Wine or Sect).
EDIT: I kinda did throw different regulations into one explanation here.
Real cheddar is full of flavour, slightly sour. Great stuff.
But you can go to places like the US and cheddar is not cheddar and they should not be allowed to call that cheddar.
Unless you live in Russia :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_t...
Protected under EU law. Only tomatoes of a specific type AND from the specific region can use the name "San Marzanos".
Outside the EU I don't think there is anything stopping yoou from labling any random tomato as "San Marzano".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...
Why not just say "no, I don't like tomatoes" and save the effort? Nobody has to justify why they like or dislike the things that they do.
Although we’re very good at that here in NL
[edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out.
Like, all these people have had marinara sauce and even ketchup, which are made from varieties of tomatoes that are still cultivated for flavor (and thus unsuitable for long-distance shipping). They know what tomatoes actually taste like!! yet still eat these slices of pink tomato that somehow have less flavor than American cucumbers and think “this is the same thing”