Why are Grocery Store Tomatoes so Inferior?
- Thread starter Richmond B. Funkenhouser
- Start date
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I think Linda Lovelace once said that...
I'd imagine she knew quite well how they taste.
They both taste very good. Texture is good too. Not great but very good. They are either Orange Hat or Hartman’s Yellow Gooseberry I forget. And the red &purple ones are Cosmic Purple Rain.
Wife made another gallon of tomato sauce today. The freezer is getting filled with this year’s goodness. Always nice to make a batch of chili or pasta sauce in the middle of winter and get a taste of summer.
There's going to be a couple good reasons for the difference. One is that with your home tomatos you can carefully water and treat them so that they grow well, whereas the field that a store gets them from can have a giant number and thus it can be harder giving them that indiviual care. Another is that the store ones might have more pesticides than you might use.
But actually occasionally I get home-grown ones that aren't great either. So at least with the store there's supposed to be at least some level of quality control that throws out the bad ones.
Our plants all died back in the late summer, but Have made a resurgence.
I've got a few on the vine that are just about to turn ripe.
Supposed to be in the 20's tonight, I believe this is our first frost. This cold snap will probably kill them. Almost had December tomatoes, without the greenhouse.
@Servant King you still got tomatoes?
I've got a few on the vine that are just about to turn ripe.
Supposed to be in the 20's tonight, I believe this is our first frost. This cold snap will probably kill them. Almost had December tomatoes, without the greenhouse.
@Servant King you still got tomatoes?
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Nope, nighttime temps dropped precipitously starting around mid-October, killed off all the plants. We were eating the last of our harvest into the first week of November, however. Probably ended up with a few hundred tomatoes when all was said and done. Granted, they were all quite small; probably the biggest of the lot were only racquetball sized. Still, it felt incredibly prolific as it was happening. During the peak of the harvest, we gave away a big bag of 'em to two separate neighbors, and my in-laws (should've experimented on this batch with a strychnine soak).
Always good to have plans for next year.
Most of the store bought tomatoes here ( Pa ) are from either Mexico or Canada. We don't grow tomatoes in the USA?
Quite a few grown in Slocomb, Alabama, in the southern part of the state, and Sand Mountain tomatoes, grown in northern Alabama.
I don't know where those all go, maybe they make it up to you... But to me they're just run of the mill grocery store tomatoes. People around here do rave about 'em... I think it's just marketing.
I’m a little late to the game, but this missive needs correcting. It’s a mighty broad brush you’re painting with.
There are plenty of people here in the US who “eat seasonally”, at least to the extent that it’s possible. A lot of them are farmers, but there are also many folks who only buy local or only buy what’s fresh. Many states have farmer’s market programs for inner city food stamp recipients, bringing seasonal produce to neighborhoods that often don’t have a supermarket.
We mostly eat with the seasons, not out of ideology, but because we like buying fresh food from the many farm stands nearby. That and I know how crops are grown and harvested in many other countries.