we have a small community garden in which we grow some fruits and vegetables in the summer, including tomatoes, strawberries, carrots, cucumbers, apples etc, some of these plant species are many decades old and they taste amazing
if you compare these to their commercially sold counterparts, you’ll find that the latter are very watered down, rubber-like, overgrown substances, optimized for transportation and storage, not for taste, and taste as though someone verbally described their taste to an alien, who later tried to reproduce it from scratch and added too much water
strawberries, blueberries and tomatoes have been hit the worst in my opinion, it’s so bad that I try to avoid these as much as possible
I observed this trend everywhere I’ve been, and what worries me is that a ton of people may be unaware that all of these things actually taste amazing in their “conventional” variants, plus due to their seeming unpopularity these species are starting to slowly disappear
anyone else notice this?
Could be because industrial farming drains the soil of nutrition and synthetic fertilizers are not enough to replenish the replenish the soil properly.
Idk just speculating here.
Soil quality does seem a big factor. It would be interesting to see if a community garden with poor soil still outperforms commercial in terms of taste and potency
and the power of seed monocultures that are relatively simple to market (due to their appearance) and scale production for than their conventional counterparts. the former is replacing the latter due to the imposition of free trade across continents, destroying the indigenous, tastier (but also more perishable?) seed varieties.