[rollthehard6]

Reminds of all those times we are told that 'customers demanded X', as if we all stood outside supermarkets with placards saying, "We demand huge strawberries that don't taste of anything". The market does what helps the market, it often isn't good for people or the planet they inhabit - that's the story of our current era and customers need to demand change on that basis.

[taneq]

Yeah but when faced with the choice between the tomatoes that were $8.50/kg and really nice but would go off in 2 days, vs. the tomatoes that were $4.50/kg and still nice and red and lasted a whole week but were pretty tasteless, you bought the latter, didn't you?

Customers demand things by paying money for them.

[bbddg]

Customers in many cases don't have the information to know the potential long term damages of buying the $4.50/kg tomatoes. It's insane to put that burden on the end user as opposed to the tomato grower. How in the world is the customer supposed to know what pesticides are used and what the damages could be?

Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates the actual cause of these problems. Which is generally an economic system that puts private profits above everything else.

[neom]

What's extra weird is that everything got really cheap, yet most people don't have any money, and the environment is in disarray. I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap.

What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it in real dollars, whose huge mortgage payment is in turn now eating more than all of the money saved from having crappy tomatoes.

[neom]

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

[AnthonyMouse]

Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.

To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.

[bilbo0s]

History won't be looking kindly on anyone in this era. Wealthy or not.

It's not like before, when no one knew how things worked and were subsequently duped into doing dumb things. In this era, historians will find the information was openly published on the internet, in music, in newscasts, in movies, etc for all to see, and we still did the dumb thing.

I suspect entire books on everything from history to psychology will be written in an attempt to dissect and figure out what was going on and how this could happen?

[AdrianB1]

$4.5/kg does not look cheap at all, I buy tomatoes for less than $1/kg directly from farmers 15 km outside the city or up to $1.5 from the Mega Image (Belgian chain) at the end of the street. The cheap ones have great taste, the supermarket ones are bad, I buy those only outside of the regular season when they are the only option.

[bbddg]

puts every imaginable fruit and veggie in a store at extremely low prices

Why are people buying this food that is harming the planet??

[neom]

Probably because those that produced and distributed goods and services (be it red meat, pesticides, prescription medications, airline tickets or Tupperware) did not clearly understand (or did and chose not to) and spell out the true cause and effect for the average consumer.

[DFHippie]

You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just see it as a cost and a hassle and a totem of a hostile tribe they want to drive out of their society; but the people who are paid to rail against it are paid by interests who know well what the regulation is meant to do and know that they will be the externalizers without it. And what they're paying for is agents who will bamboozle the majority, keeping them useful, angry idiots.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not as simple as "regulation good" or "regulation bad" -- there are plenty of companies that lobby for regulation because they know it will exclude smaller competitors, or ward off lawsuits because they followed the regulations even if people still died, or they want them to get passed while their stooge is in the majority so they can draft the rules themselves and then claim that it was already done last year when someone else wants to do something more effective next year.

There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.

The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.

[primroot]

Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.

I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.

When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.

But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.

[DFHippie]

Sure. There's regulatory capture. But this particular problem, the externalization of costs, is a classic one solved by regulation rather than the free market.

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem where the pesticides are destroying native insect populations, sure. But not the problem where the tomatoes taste like nothing and have pesticide in them -- that's not an externality, it's an information asymmetry. And then it has the same problem in the legislature as the supermarket.

[duckMuppet]

Central planning is a failure throughout history.

The problem isn't the capitalism that transitioned the US into a powerhouse that feeds the world or provides goods at discounted prices, or ensures that millennials in Minnesota can enjoy avocado dip while complaning about having to much.

This is a failure at the local level. Ever spent time in the grocery isle? Children believe their meat comes from meat packages. Not that it was a living creature at one point. As people have moved into cities, they've lost the connection to the land that provides for them, and life's interconnectedness.

Top this off with the crony capitalism that gives subsidies to farmers for tariffs, or subsides for a myriad of other reasons all of which are asinine(like ethanol or which crops yield most), and prevent groups like Monsanto from any real liability (both civil and criminal) by giving them government/EPA endorsements.. Such endorsements often take years before they recognize a mistake was made or that their data from 1977 is woefully inaccurate.

No this is a horror story of central planning gone horrifically wrong again, and no one can prosecute/sue these terrible companies out of existence because they have the EPA's blue checkmark and some politicians endorsement.

In the absence of the ability for individuals to hold companies liable for their mistakes, it is absolutely incumbent on individuals and parents to make sound choices. Depending on the government to be your saviour simply leads to more tragedy.

[bbddg]

I stopped after you unironically started complaining about millennials and avocado dip (guacamole?)

[PeterStuer]

Negative externalities are not priced in. The whole neoliberal market game is to extract benefits while pushing the burdens onto others. Vote with your wallet is only honest if all externalities would be priced in, otherwise it is just a vehicle for shifting the blame onto the hapless consumer.

[arcticbull]

Red isn’t a flavor and nice isn’t a texture though. Those $4.50 tomatoes are light red, mealy and flavorless. They’re the Red Delicious of the tomato world.

If you haven’t tried California dry farm tomatoes do yourself a favor, they’re worlds apart and worth every penny.

[monetus]

Also, keep your eye out for granger county TN tomatoes. Incredible.

[mikeash]

When did I have that choice?

[jimhi]

We did demand X though. The supermarkets had both tasteless strawberries and organic ones and we made our choice. Many supermarkets still have organic ones and we still pick the cheaper, larger, less tasty one.

[nck4222]

Organic doesn't mean more flavor.

Tasteless strawberries are around for a few reasons

1) you can't try before you buy. bigger, redder strawberries look better, so sell better, so are grown more, and so on until that's the expectation. if varieties are cultivated for their looks, that means they're not cultivated for their taste or sugar content

2) bigger strawberries are easier/faster to pick, which means they're cheaper to pick

3) people want strawberries in winter, which means for a lot of us that means we're accustomed to buying strawberries that have been shipped thousands of miles and not picked recently.

https://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/152944880/bigger-means-better...

[pfdietz]

> Organic doesn't mean more flavor.

It doesn't formally mean that, but often it means that in practice.

I think some of the success of organic food is that it can in practice be a marker for attractive features that otherwise have nothing to do with "organic". Consumers learn the association and use it, even if they don't buy into the organic philosophy.

[bryanlarsen]

There are much better labels than "organic" to indicate flavor. "Heirloom", "local", "in-season", "small plot", "not greenhouse grown", "small", "picked ripe", "picked today" are all labels that are more likely to indicate flavor than organic, IMO.

But the best is to find a producer or label that prioritizes flavor.

Organic produce has monopolized the premium section of supermarkets. Without organic, supermarkets would find some other way to sell higher margin produce to less price conscious consumers. That dimension would probably be taste (or locality, which I have another rant about).

[mikeash]

Maybe they should try advertising this.

For me, "organic" is a marker for "bullshit label that's used to convince people to pay more." If they actually do taste better, I might buy the stuff.

[mc32]

Most supermarkets have pint baskets where you’re allowed to sample. Sometimes they have sampling and “pit” trays. So people do have a choice at least in some supermarkets.

The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.

Seascapes and Rosas have a decent combo of shelflife and taste.

[corey_moncure]

>The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.

Are you married and if so, do both of you work full time jobs? My hunch is that this is directly related to two-income households

[radmarshallb]

Shelflife has always been a big hurdle to cooking for me, and I’m a bachelor.

[RugnirViking]

I suppose there are certain tricks to it, but one of the big things I do to make this much less of a problem is to make meals using only one or two at most short-life items.

The rest of the meal comes from things that will happily sit for weeks on end in the cupboard without going off. Things like: Pasta, onions, tomato pureé, garlic, stock cubes, kidney beans, lentils, rice, bacon, etc.

This does mean that often the one fresh thing I use is the meat in any given dish.

This is analogous to how people used to cook as well, keeping a large store of long-life ingredients and merely supplimenting them with whatever was fresh.

[selimthegrim]

In a similar boat, and I find that meat and veggies I buy from the CSA have longer fridge life because they were butchered/picked closer to selling time

[elygre]

I want my strawberries to survive till nightfall. Because strawberries.. yum!

[lonelappde]

Why is a long lasting bad thing better than a short lasting good thing? Why not buy frozen berries, dehydrated berries, or just cardboard, if shelf life is the priority?

[bamboozled]

I just want to share an anecdotal story with regards to "tasteless" produce from super markets.

I used to absolutely despise eating salad, I never knew why but I always just thought it was boring and I'd rather eat anything else; However, my girlfriend and I wanted to buy produce that wasn't wrapped in plastic so we started to shop at a local market held each week.

There we meet a Tongan farmer who grew everything using traditional methods, the biggest difference he said was that he used absolutely minimal irrigation (unless absolutely required due to drought at planting) and he also said that what made vegetables bitter was pesticides and it turned people off them (so I'm assuming he dind't use them). He said that the lack of pesticides and excessive water is what made his stuff taste so great, and his groups had to be a little tougher to survive so he believed they were healthier crops.

Anyway the guy was legit and he and his wife often held weekends where you could visit his farm and see everything, it was real deal.

The main point I wanted to make was that, while we were being produce from this guy, I noticed that I actually loved eating the salads, like became quite addicted to them, he even sold the flowers from all the vegetables and told us the best nutrients are found in the flours, they were delicious. Ever since we moved away and no longer had access to this guys produce, I went off them immediately again. I really dislike standard supermarket produce.

[lonelappde]

With all respect, that's a load of magical thinking and placebo effect.

[GlenTheMachine]

Maybe but not clearly so.

The produce I grow in my garden does in fact taste much better than the produce in the supermarket. There are good reasons for this. I grow heirloom varieties that were bred for taste and not shelf life. Watermelons and tomatoes in particular really do taste much better when they are under water stress. A watermelon that has been given too much water looks fabulous and has almost no sugar. I pick them when they’re ripe not a week before that.

IDK whether pesticides make produce bitter. But the rest of the post checks out.

[DFHippie]

Poisons are typically bitter, so that point doesn't seem unreasonable. That being said, the poisons the plants produce themselves to fend off insects are also bitter, so maybe the Tongan farmer was doing something not mention to reduce insect depredations without externally applied insecticides.

[egypturnash]

I have lived in situations where there was a good farmer's market nearby where I could buy produce directly from small local farmers, and I have had the same thing happen to me. I began looking forwards to eating a salad, then stopped when I no longer had easy access to the good stuff.

The various things that happen to produce destined for a shelf halfway across the country are really just not appetizing.

[lanstin]

I will never forget the first green beans I ate from a farmers market picked the day before at the height of bean season. Wow, so sweet, so yummy. I grew up eating canned green beans. Ugh, what a travesty that is.

[bamboozled]

I don't think so because it wasn't actually me who cared about the produce, it was my partners idea to change suppliers. I just went a long with it and thought nothing of it.It wasn't until I realized I was enjoying salad that I started asking questions and I found out he was using different methods and not just reselling other farmers produce.

I must admit I noticed right away the the produce was far more visually appealing then what I was used to, more saturated colors, I put it down to it being washed more thoroughly.

I think it's also important to note that once I stopped receiving the better produce, I tried very hard to continue liking salads, I just couldn't do it.

On a side note, I'd like to say is, it's a shame people miss out on eating the flowers of plants, they're really delicious and a visually impressive addition to salads.

[hourislate]

Organic only means that the grower can't use synthetic pesticides, so Organic Foods are not pesticide free. The Government has allowed various Organic Pesticides that growers can use. I still choose Organic for most of my food whether that makes a difference or not.

Getting back to the Original story, the Pesticides used in Organic Farming still kill insects.

Here is a link with more information.

http://npic.orst.edu/ingred/organic.html

[shims]

Many organic pesticides are synthetic. The organic label in the US doesn't mean much.

[nobodyandproud]

I pay a premium for tasty, often seasonal fruit like strawberries and peaches because the difference in taste is night and day.

One tastes better than candy. The other will teach kids not to eat fruit.

A tip: Use your nose to sniff and distinguish between what’s ripe and tasty and what’s merely visually appealing.

[LargeWu]

I think you've touched on an important point here: Not only do we demand perfect looking produce, we demand it out of season, and we demand it to be shipped in from all over the world on a daily basis.

The reason we use pesticides is because farmers need to increase yields to meet demand. But what if we didn't demand asparagus in winter. What if we didn't demand apples in spring? What if people in northern climates didn't eat pineapple or coconut or bananas regularly? What if we bought food from the store that had bruises or imperfections?

[bamboozled]

Same, I often don’t bother buying alcohol or chocolate and spend that money on better quality produce, a good piece of fruit is better than any other desert in my opinion.

[lonelappde]

Why don't we care that fruit that is "better than candy" was genetically engineered over centuries to be full of unhealthy amounts of sugar?

Modern grocery fruits are not naturally healthy.

[nobodyandproud]

The fiber, the general high water content, pectin, and vitamins make ripe fruit a superior choice.

[sarcasmOrTears]

More than one time I bought organic and there wasn't a big difference. Fruit quality and taste is so random that in the end I buy the cheapest

[samatman]

This is in fact among the best signals, because ripe fruit is a perishable commodity that floods the market in season.

When I'm casing a supermarket looking for fruit I tend to start with price and then check the goods.

[r00fus]

This is the same reason that popular non-fast food restaurants have better tasting food in general.

The flow allows you to have more fresh produce.

I only buy organic when it’s not in some ghetto due to pricing.

[adrr]

Organic doesn’t mean pesticide free. The pesticides used are “natural” instead of man made. Organic also means manure based fertilizer which means risk of food borne diseases like Ecoli 157h and salmonella.

[rhacker]

This is a huge pet peeve of mine specifically with Organic Strawberries. Somehow this company called "Driscoll's" has started showing up nationwide for berries. Straw, Blue, Black, Rasp, etc... It must be a conglomerate at this point. But some people at various Whole Foods corporate and other outlets have just started bowing down to them. The offer the most tasteless organic strawberries in the world.

[Retric]

Except, they don’t actually give you a way to judge taste. With apples people learn of better tasting variety, but strawberries are unlabeled.

[enriquto]

aren't they? here in France there are a few labelled varieties (not as many labels as apples, though)

[Retric]

At least in the US it looks like this: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-fresh-fruits-berries-...

You don’t actually know anything about the strawberries in the bottom left other than their organic.

[Glawen]

In France they show the country of origin (region when it is from France) and the variety. Sometimes they state if it is organic.

Generally, the French fruits are more expensive but tastier. But when it is the high season of the fruit, like july/august for melon, then the french one are also cheaper.

[ravar]

I don't do this, but I do notice that in super markets lots of people do try the fruit before they it. So there are ways of making sure you get good fruit.

[primroot]

It'd be more accurate to say 'commoditization favoring economies of scale for the sake of anti-competitive oligopolization demands X.' It then takes some PR money to make people 'demand' all the crap.

Addded: the mindless commoditization is abetted by subsidies, including the subsidy of not having to price in negative externalities.