Because most big corporate growers don't care if their high yielding, disease resistant, long lasting, super duper freaky hybrid tomatoes taste good. They just want to be able to harvest their red, ripe, rock hard tomatoes with their 'Tomato Harvester' machines!

I don't think they are ripe when they are harvested. I have read numerous times that they are gassed with ethylene to make them look ripe but they are still rock hard.

A friend brought me some ripe Brandywines from his garden yesterday. Mmmmm... my favorite!

True. Not all corporations grow these super freaky hybrids. Some still use slightly older high yielding, disease resistant, long lasting hybrids. They are harvested green and unripe by humans and given the ethylene treatment to ripen them up. This is why I started growing my own. Real tomatoes are sooooo good.

SedonaDebbie said: Because most big corporate growers don't care if their high yielding, disease resistant, long lasting, super duper freaky hybrid tomatoes taste good...

Growers don't grow products if there isn't a market for them. They are simply providing what consumers want—tomatoes year round, despite the fact that tomatoes aren't at all suited for mass production or shipping. So companies have developed shippable tomatoes. That they are tasteless doesn't stop millions of consumers from buying and eating them. It's not the corporations who don't care, it's the consumers.

It's the same with apples and bananas. There are 100s of delicious varieties grown all over the world, but the fruit you find in supermarkets are the varieties bred primarily for their ability to withstand transport.

I buy store tomatoes, and now do not waste money on the green house grown ones very often, as some times any tomatoe will do, but, on rare occasions, and I do squeeze my tomatoes, some times I will get one that not as good as home grown, but far, far , far better than expected.

I've come to the conclusion that this is the reason so many people I know say they don't like fresh tomatoes; I wouldn't either, if all I'd ever eaten was one of those tasteless things that have been shipped from many miles away!

In the early days of this site I wrote a short article about finding the best home grown tomatoes for your garden. Not all home grown tomatoes are good, as I found out. You can be restricted by your length of season, amount of sun etc. With longer season in recent years your choices can change over time.

https://garden.org/ideas/view/...

And:

https://garden.org/ideas/view/...

Sandy, that theory makes sense. I confess I stopped buying tomatoes at the grocery store when I discovered the difference... maybe 40 years ago? If I'm making something that requires tomatoes out of season, I'd rather use canned products. It's just a thing with me. I'm sure there are tasty mators to be found if one looks hard enough.

Connie, great articles, and so true. I've experimented with different varieties the last two seasons and had plenty of tomatoes that have been mainly taste failures. Next year I'm going back to some tried & true.

My biggest disappointment ever with a purchased tomato was a few years back when we stopped at our favorite farm stand (in Wisconsin, just over the border with Michigan) fairly early in the season and bought a couple of huge, beautiful-looking tomatoes that turned out to be completely flavorless (and didn't have the best texture, either). I'm sure they must have purchased them somewhere just to kind of round out what was available at their stand early in the season. (Mostly what we buy there is sweet corn to freeze, which is always excellent.)

I buy grocery store winter tomatoes now and then. But I don't expect the taste and texture of homegrown. I just enjoy a winter sandwich with tomato more than without. The winter tomato is more like a lettuce substitute, for moisture and color.

But, the picture starting the thread shows a truck full of red tomatoes. So Im not sure what we're buying, red ones or green ones artificially ripened? And some are greenhouse grown.

sallyg said: I buy grocery store winter tomatoes now and then. But I don't expect the taste and texture of homegrown. I just enjoy a winter sandwich with tomato more than without. The winter tomato is more like a lettuce substitute, for moisture and color.

But, the picture starting the thread shows a truck full of red tomatoes. So Im not sure what we're buying, red ones or green ones artificially ripened? And some are greenhouse grown.

Machine harvested tomatoes are normally for processing. These need a degree of ripening before processing where nicks and bruises are not important. They are usually hauled directlyt to the cannery/ processor. Market tomatoes require more care in harvesting and for long shelf life are carefully harvested as greens or breakers, then gassed in a controlled environment.

Ah, thanks for the explanation! I too wondered about the red vs green tomatoes in the photo.

As so often, Farmerdill has the essential info.

I can quite honestly tell you, those tomatoes going from California and other states into the large Farmers Markets in Chicago and Boston, and NY, all for fresh produce, have not been gassed. They are ripened as they cross the continent by truck drivers babysitting one tomato with a thermometer near it. They report in to dispatchers or brokers the temperature inside the refrigerated trailer, and the color of that tomato at least once a day. Those tomatoes are ripened by temperatures alone, one degree more or less and arrive at the market depending on the intelligence of the driver to arrive at the most maximum freshness. Or at least they were in my day...todays drivers (and dispatchers) are less hands on.
This has nothing to do with the conditions the tomatoes grew in that affected the taste of the produce.
I am eating cherry tomatoes from my grocery store that are apparently grown in southern France and do not have seeds as options to sell outside of that market - and these tomatoes are awesome good.

That is very interesting, Kat!

Kind of too bad they are going to all that trouble and the tomatoes still taste like more or less nothing .

Kat

We used to live near one of the ethylene gas chambers and different grocery chains request different levels of gas which amounts to different shades of pink/red. Doesn't do a thing for the taste, just the color.