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The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?
So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…
My wife, a keen gardener of heirloom tomatoes, says it's because the varieties that sell commercially are bred for long shelf-life and nothing else.
My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I'm 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn't have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think "wait......was my grandpa rich before he died?" I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.
The end result is, she said to my grandpa "I don't care what you do inside the house. I don't care how you decorate. I don't care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE." My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you'd swear this was a farmland with no animals.
Everytime I'd go over to her house as a kid, I'd run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.
I'd eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like "HEY!!! THAT'S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN'T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I'M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!"
And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad "HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I'M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!"
It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.
Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn't shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn't have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.
When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I'm getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn't even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn't afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.
She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say "I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don't know WHAT I'd do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can't get enough of them!"
Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying "don't fucking touch my tomatoes!!!" Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.
Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn't be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I'm the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She'd say "Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I'm just going to call it worthless."
I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I'm never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I'll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I'M 90 years old. I'll seem crazy, and it'll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.
I'll seem crazy, but oh well. That's fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That's the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She'd help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn't take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn't need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT'S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.
I for one loved reading your rambling, 10/10 would do again even without the tangential relation to the topic
What a fantastic story! I could feel the warm sun, and taste the fresh vegetables. It really brought a smile to my face. I remember growing up in the late 80's and my parents had an old man neighbor with a garden. He used to give tomatoes to me and my siblings and we would sit on the back steps with a salt shaker and just shake some salt on them and eat them like they were apples. They were delicious! For years I have wondered if my memory was serving me wrong, or if tomatoes have just gotten flavorless over the years. I'm happy to hear it's not just me.
My great grandmother recently passed at the age of 100. Summers in her garden were something truly special. They had a small backyard, but the victory garden covered most of it. If I ever reach grandma status, I hope I will have an impeccable garden and carry on the tradition. Thanks for the story, it brought back so many memories. I would kill for a fresh tomato sandwich now.
That's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing. My mom was an avid gardener also. I miss her so much!
Thanks for the story. That was a fun read.
Ah that would certainly explain it.
My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it's as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven't been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
Not quite, but close! Molecular plant breeder here.
There is no set "limit" to flavour but it's a complex trait that is easy to lose if you don't select for it. If you breed for size, and don't track taste, it's very easy to leave the flavour-producing aspects unchanged, thus resulting in a "dilution". Furthermore, you're often actively selecting against flavour, indirectly and unintentionally, by selecting for shelf life - if something doesn't ripen, it won't over-ripen and spoil.
This is what has historically happened to a lot of produce but it doesn't have to be the case - modern breeding lets us breed for flavour and nutrition too! Heirloom varieties can offer some reprieve, but for all their taste they tend to be quite unproductive and sickly (ofter "heirloom" means inbred and that does not produce very fit organisms).
Good news is, new varieties are being bred that have it all - yield, taste, and nutrition! It's just hard to convince consumers and businesses to switch over to new varieties, as you don't really buy according to the flavour, just the looks.
Greetings from the UK ;)
Thanks for such an in depth answer. Is there a good place to buy seeds for newer strains like this?
You're welcome 😊
What we can do in terms of breeding varies significantly between crops - tomato's a breeze, apples are hard, potato used to be a nightmare but is improving rapidly. If you're interested in modern seed, I'd recommend turning to a breeding company.
For example, Rijk Zwaan are a major supplier in Europe for a number of crops. https://rijkzwaan.co.uk/home
Happy growing!
That is fascinating! You should do an AMA.
I would love to see fewer monocultures at the supermarket. I have noticed lately that a number of new apple varieties have been popping up, at least where I am in Canada. I keep hoping for some kind of craft beer-like renaissance in produce where there is a lot more to explore and rabid fandom over particular varieties.
I'm glad it was interesting! I think we'll all appreciate more variety in our diets.
The apples you mentioned are a good example of this. Apple breeders used to always breed the flavour away in favour of looks since that's what sells. When one guy bred a tasty apple, only for his colleagues to make it tasteless again, he decided to brand it and enforce some quality control. Breeders were very skeptical, and few could imagine that consumers would care about what apple variety they're eating - do you know what type of potato or cucumber you buy? But in the end, consumers proved willing to engage and branded apples are now widespread. Tenderstem broccoli has recently inspired Brassica breeders to start branding and marketing their new varieties.
I'm involved with some breeders trying to do the same with potatoes!
Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.
Also look. If many Americans saw a tomato slice on their burger that was not perfectly round but instead very irregular with lots of divots and varying shades of red, orange, and yellow, they'd bring it to the counter and say they got a rotten tomato.
A local supermarket some years ago put heirloom tomatoes right next to regular tomatoes for basically the same price one summer. They stopped selling heirloom tomatoes after that year because hardly anyone bought them. I did. They were incredible.
True story, you'd have to sell those at the vegan commune or something.
But you can get decent flavor out of a round red tomato. I know, I do it every year.