memes

This is gonna sound kinda bougie of me but local stuff even just tastes better than mass-produced stuff. I started getting a weekly farm box from one down the road, and my god, I have never tasted a carrot so carroty in my entire life.

Scaled markets prefer patented hybrid seeds (yes, that's real) that have high shelf life, resistance to bruising, and a uniform shape that makes them easy to pack. And high-yield of course. The flavour isn't really relevant to the corporate farming system, certainly not as much as crop yield and longevity for shipping them is. And of course these patented hybrids are all sterile so farmers have to buy more seeds each year.

Go to a smaller independent business however, and they're often using different breeds. Maybe they can't afford (or qualify for) these fancy hybrids. Maybe they just don't want them.

If you want a tomato that is full of flavour and ripened on the plant, fed with sugar from the stalk, you can't get one from a supermarket. It's just cheaper to pick them early while they're green, ship them, and let them 'ripen' (or turn red) in an enzyme bin, even if they're not gaining any sugars that way without the plant.

I prefer local home-grown because I prefer delicious tomatoes that last a week in the fridge more than I do sour water-balloons that look pristine and shiny on the counter for twice as long. I buy my food to eat it, not look at it.

Most veggies in grocery stores are bred for things like appearance and shelf life more than actual quality.

I think tomatoes are a prime example of this.

Tomatoes bruise easily, and people kind of want to buy the perfect, round, bright red tomatoes, not a weird lumpy-looking, funny colored bruised up one.

So big farmers grow tomatoes that look pretty, and are sturdier to better handle being shipped thousands of miles, that will last better on grocery store shelves, etc.

But there's trade-offs there for things like texture and taste. That perfect-looking tomato may be bland and watery.

They may also be doing stuff like picking them before they're fully ripe and artificially ripening them with ethylene gas or something later in a warehouse.

When you get tomatoes from a smaller, local farmer though, they don't have to be shipped as far, or sit around in a warehouse or grocery store as long, so they don't need to pick varieties based on shelf life and ability to stand up to shipping, and can instead grow varieties that taste good. And they can pick them at their peak ripeness because they're going more directly from the field to the consumer and they don't have to rely on tricks like ethylene.

My wife isn't a picky eater, but when we first started dating she thought that she didn't really like tomatoes.

But she had only ever had regular grocery store tomatoes.

Until we moved in together and I grew some myself. Then she discovered that tomatoes can actually be really good. Now she can't get enough of them, as long as they're good tomatoes.

And I didn't even grow any particularly fancy tomatoes. That first year that I made a convert of her I just had some regular ol' beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes that I picked up as pre-started plants from Walmart or home Depot or somewhere like that, and grew them in pots on the patio of our apartment. Basically entry-level gardening, but that was enough to blow her mind.

Another year I grew, I think the variety was called something like "mucho nacho" jalapenos. We love jalapenos to begin with, but holy shit. That particular variety was everything we ever wanted a jalapeno to be. We had one or two other varieties going that year to have a comparison, but that one stood head-and-shoulders above the others, bigger, a little hotter, and just plain tastier.

And farmers can probably get their hands on even better varieties than whatever I could get at a big box hardware store, and have the know-how to really give them ideal growing conditions.

Not as fresh? Maybe grown out of season in a different climate and also (in the case of cauliflower) usually growing black spots before it comes out of the bag.

My local grocery has been real bad about green beans as of late.

They're grown for looks instead of flavor and usually picked before they're ripe, for one. Not to mention the logistics of mass production and transportation means they've been knocked around pretty bad by the time they get to your grocer.

Industrial fertilizer is an unholy abomination