Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

As an ex Californian, I have to say that you are spoiled. Even the short trip to Washington reduces the quality of our veggies by quite a bit. (Of course our apples are quite a bit better.)

You know, as someone who spent his childhood in India before migrating to the United States, I'm still struck by how tasteless tomatoes in most supermarkets are compared to the tomatoes we used to get in India from the neighborhood vendor. Tomatoes in the US are bred for size, firmness, color, consistency, disease resistance, but not really for taste. In India, you had to examine your tomato carefully and cut it carefully and check for blight or holes (signs of worms). But by god, they were much tastier. This is not pure nostalgia, too.

The same used to hold for Indian "village" chickens -- smaller than American chickens, but much tastier. Sadly that isn't the case any more, not becaus American chickens have got tastier, but because Indian chicken producers seemed to have moved to factory ranching..

abk, most older americans long for the days when tomatoes tasted like tomatoes. What we have nowadays are genetically engineering lumps that are bred to be picked green, and survive shipping. If I want to eat tomatoes, I have to grow my own.

Several years ago, I grew my own in the winter when I lived in Indiana, and would routinely have police officers knocking on my door (they were visible through 6 basement windows so no smash and grab search warrants were needed). It seems that anyone growing things indoors is automatically suspect (almost all the technology for indoor growing is currently driven by marijuana growers and has been for the last decade). I didn't mind them coming by, because we all had a laugh when they saw what was really growing.

1) Whole Foods in Marin sometimes gets pretty good Mexican "dry grown" organic tomatoes for $4/lb in the winter. Since Monterey Market and the Berkeley Bowl consistently beat all Marin vendors for produce availability and quality and price, you might look for them next winter.

2) Much premium produce suffers greatly from mass production. Examples include the heirloom tomatoes and the tasteless "baby organic salad mix" currently sold by upscale supermarkets.

3) In their fragility and their intimate relationship with the solar year, tomatoes may just adapt poorly to the usual tactics of shipping across the equator and training to grow indoors.

4) There are workarounds besides canning: salting and slow roasting both concentrate flavor and can make mediocre winter plum tomatoes quite decent.

I'll second all this. It is not all that surprising that we cannot get good out of season tomatoes when getting good in season tomatoes is hard enough.

My cousin's husband recently got into the tomatoe business in missouri. Initially, he grew a tasty tomatoe for one of the local supermarket chains. it was picked when it was almost ripe, hand sorted on the farm to cull out all the tomatoes with imperfections, and then delivered to the store. It was not a quite a good farmers' market heirloom (too fragile for commerical growing), but it was quite tasty. Not a supermarket tomatoe.

the supermarket, though, decided that the tasty tomatoes were not working for them. Tomatoes are delicate, and cannot be stored successfully at very low temperatures while ripe without losing all taste(I gather most vegetables are stored at temperatures close to freezing, not tomatoes). Tasty tomatoes cannot be stored at all, more or less, and have to be sold quickly or they all go bad, and too many were going bad. Bottom line: this year my cousin is growing a commercial hybrid that lacks taste, that is picked green, that is shipped to firm in st. louis that sorts out the good looking tomatoes from the culls (and presumably sells the culls in a secondary market) and that can be stored at relatively low temperatures while green for an extended period of time and then ripened by raising the temperature a bit in line with demand. Makes his life easier, but it is a loss for the world.

I suspect the same basic problems apply to tasty winter tomatoes -- the losses in the production process associated with producing tasty tomatoes are very large, and make it hard to compete with a tasteless tomatoe.

p.s. this is one case where the requirements of efficient supermarket distribution truely work against quality.

May I suggest that you appreciate tomatoes when they're actually in season and accept that the season really matters the rest of the year?

Tomatoes aren't widgets - at least good tomatoes aren't.

Ripe tomatoes picked in the opposite hemisphere
(Argentina, for example) to provide winter
eating here would not travel well.

Spoiled Brad.

Here in Oregon, good hothouse tomatoes are shipped down from BC; try your local organic produce store. (Whole Foods doesn't count--they're not local.)

As to the broader issue: what appears on supermarket shelves has very little to do with what supermarket customers want most and are willing to pay for. If I were a "libertarian", now, I would give you a lecture on the free market, and chastise you for even thinking a business could do anything wrong.

Tomatoes need their fair share of abuse to reach peak flavor. The same is true for wine grapes and many other fruits and veggies. TLC often results in bland but beautiful produce and given the choice many consumers prefer beauty to other qualities, in this and many other things.

When tomatoes are heat stressed, deprived of water and nutrients - not too much, too long or at the wrong times - they become more more flavorful.

This isn't a moral lesson, though it is often taken for one, it's a biological lesson.

To add: I think that most American consumers actually think these tasteless lumps in supermarkets are actually real tomatoes. Thus, there is little demand for real delicious tomatoes, and hence no incentive to grow them. Its a race towards the bottom.

I would like to rant here too about the use of salad dressings. It is my firm opinion that other than a little vinegar, salt and/or yoghurt, most produce items (other than greens) shouldn't need any dressings. Tomatoes with or without a little salt should be how you eat them -- not lathered in some other supermarket concotion. If I were paranoid, I would suspect that tasteless salad items are a plot to get us to purchase more salad dressings.

On a somewhat related note, when did someone last have a Red Delicious apple that was, well, delicious?

Grocery stores, restaurants, and shippers don't know that tomatoes (ripe or unripe) should NEVER be refrigerated.

I have not had a decent tomato (summer, winter, fall or spring) in at least 8 years. I have not tried Whole Foods or organic grocers, but you used to be able to get a halfway decent tomato at the local Safeway.

All these "hothouse", "on the vine", and other various branded and tiny stickered tomatoes are impostors.

Italian tomatoes are delicious, and ripe, and not that much more expensive than ours, especially when you realize they have to be delivered almost daily to a fruttivendolo. We cannot do this?

I also agree with abk: though I like a bit of olive oil and fresh basil, with or without fresh buffalo mozzarella.

Not genetic engineering but traditional plant breeding.

Homegrown tomatoes do not have to be stored and transported to market. Breeders can concentrate on flavor.

Store tomatoes have to survive being picked, packed, stored, trucked, unpacked and other abuse.

Breeders place a premium on tomatoes that arrive intact and lesser premium on taste. If flavor and marketability are negatively linked, then the result is very tasty tomatoes that don't survive commerce and commerical tomates that look good but lack flavor.

Attempts to get around the constraints of traditional plant breeding by using genetic engineering have not met with wide consumer acceptance. In fact, there is organized opposition. Because of the expense and problematic marketing of a genetically engineered tomato, research is currently off the table.

Yes you can get good greenhouse tomatoes in winter, but not good commercial tomatoes. The solution is to grow your own.

abk: "I think that most American consumers actually think these tasteless lumps in supermarkets are actually real tomatoes."

Well, if you never in your life have seen anything else, that's plausible. But what of those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced "real" tomatos in their lives? The same probably goes for all the tropical fruit that don't grow here. Who knows what they really taste like?

Brad: The bottom line is, a business that works by economy of scale (and a geographically distributed producer base) has a hard time serving minority interests. But would you really pay, say, $20 for a pound of tomatoes? As we pretty much agree that long-distance transport does not work, you cannot make use of cheap land & labor, and the restriction to local growers probably reduces competition as well.

To get decent tomatoes, you pretty much have to grow them yourself (or know someone who does - there are usually too many to keep at harvest time).

One of the biggest problems is deciding which variety best suits your tastes and circumstances.

If you're after that real tomato goodness, you probably want to try one of the old-fashioned varieties, which have not been bred for disease and pest-resistance, shelf life, or glamorous appearance. Those are all wonderful traits, especially if you're selling tomatoes, but if you really want that flavor, here's a good place to start:

100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden

http://www.growinglifestyle.com/us/prod/0761114009.html

There are SIX grades of tomatoes in Honolulu and they're ALL tasteless. At up to $6.00/lb!!I gave up loooooong ago.

Try the soylent orange, it's delicious!

cm --

i have been known to pay $5 a pound for really good tomatoes, since i really cannot grow them myself. but $20 is too much.

i agree with your analysis about food distribution that works off economies of scale and a geographically disbursed production base, which makes transportability and storability key criterias. i don't think this necessarily precludes serving minority tastes though. freshfields has tons of french cheese that must appeal to a relatively small minority, and that are produced by a geographically disbursed set of french farmers. The difference between cheese and tomatoes -- presumably two: one, and no doubt most important, cheese has a long shelf life and does not spoil, so it lends itself to refigerated distribution/ storage. tomatoes do not. second, speciality cheeses presumably not only can be sold for a nice premium, but also bring some shoppers into the stores where they buy other goods. good tomatoes must not ...

by the way, peaches also seem to be very adversely hurt by supermarket distribution requirements. the ratio of tasty juicy peaches with real peach taste to dry, wooden, tasteless peaches at most supermarkets is appalling. presumably for much the same reason -- peaches have to be picked green to survive shipping.

Tomatoes. The world's most delicious fruit, to be eaten in season, and never out of it. If you want tomatoes out of season, rehydrate sundried. If you want good tomatoes, find a grocer who has access to the supply or grow your own. To everything there is a season. In my part of the continent, the tomatoe season runs from mid-July to mid-September. Enjoy. It's like a sunny day in Scotland.

Brad DeLong writes:
>
> Are there no sunlamps? Are there no greenhouses? Why can't
> we get winter tomatoes--costing arms and legs to be sure,
> but still getting them--as good as our fresh summer
> tomatoes? It's not as though are grocery stores are short of
> vegetable space.

It seems just like yesterday that Brad DeLong was having a "Hayekian moment" (his words) about the invisible hand that brought him out-of-season clementines, but now the tables have turned, I see. :-)

Others on this thread have suggested that real tomatoes can no longer be bought. That's emphatically not true, at least here in Columbia, MO. Every summer comes the tomato harvest anew, and the local vegetable growers sell about a dozen different varieties of them at the farmer's market (3 days a week). Transported from anywhere between several hundred feet and maybe 20 miles away, you can get them dead ripe in season, and they are glorious. Unfortunately, 20 miles or so is pushing the limit of how far you can cart them. But all in all, summer tomatoes in central Missouri are one of the only really good reasons to hang out around here after July 1st or so. Today, the high temperature in Columbia was about 93, and the dewpoint was 74 I think. Tomorrow will be hotter. Things will cool down by mid-September. But at least we get tomatoes you big city slickers can only dream about. :-)

Let me get in a plug for farmers' markets, greenmarkets and the little bodega on the corner that sells a bit of produce. Make the extra effort and patronize these establishments! I know, people are busy and it's easier to go to a supermarket, but if you really care about good food, start caring about the small farmers who are struggling to survive, get in your car, find them and buy from them. There are cooperatives to which one can subscribe which will delivery fresh produce straight from the farm to your doorstep (or a neighborhood drop-off). There are farmstands just outside most (all?) cities. Believe me, farmers are trying to find you to sell you a good tomato -- look around a little more and you'll find them.

SLOW FOOD RULES!

A word in favor of supermarket tomatoes, they are getting somewhat better. The problem is known and everybody understands that the group that cracks it is going to make a huge amount of money off of it so people are working on it.

Growing up, my parents grew tomatoes. Now that I've got my own place and my own family, I'm picking up the tradition. But I still remember the truly awful stuff of my childhood and find today's supermarket tomatoes still far below acceptable levels of taste but somewhat better than when I was a kid.

What I want to know is why tinned tomatoes sell for a dollar in downtown NYC, when they cost 7p to 15p a tin in downtown London supermarkets.

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