That's probably because you're buying them year-round at supermarkets instead of in the summer at farmer's markets.
Strawberries are extremely, extremely perishable.
Ones that can be grown year-round in California and survive shipping to New York need to be larger and harder to not turn to mush, there's just no other option.
But here in New York, in June and part of July (only) you can of course buy delicious local strawberries that are everything a strawberry should be. Usually at orchards or farmers' markets -- local supermarkets usually don't carry them, I'm not sure if it's because of logistics (they really need to be sold same-day or next-day in the worst case) or because farmers don't want/need to give a cut to a middleman, or both.
So I don't think robot picking will change any of that.
Nope, is jus that 1) big strawberries are often treated with giberelines (a plant hormone) to grow big
2) Off season reasons. There is a race to put the first strawberries in the market. They are sold for more money (because is a luxury and people want to celebrate the end of a harsh winter), but lack taste. Is the prize to pay for wanting to eat strawberries at the "wrong time" and in some sense is not an unfair prize. Many early or extra-late fruits are not so good as the in season cultivars, but when they mature there is nothing more, so is also fine to have it.
You can just wait for the spring and taste more flavoured fruits.
No, it's because consumers believe bigger = better.
Same thing with people saying the Dutch tomatoes they find in their supermarket are watery. No, it's because your supermarket has found that they can make more by selling the bigger (and cheaper) tomatoes. They could easily buy the more tasty varieties if they wanted to.
> The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.
You must be getting them from the wrong place, because the ones in California are delicious. You can often find them on the sides of highways in farm country. Spectacular.
I live in Palo Alto and don't see the small strawberries I'm used to even at the two farmer's markets. They're always the huge ones. I'm used to the tiny ones the size of my fingernail. I grow them myself (they spread everywhere) but I never see them in shops around here.
Someone told me once that european strawberries grew wild in forests and those were the only strawberries europeans knew. Small and very sweet but so fragile that you can't really pack and sell them.
Eventually some europeans stumbled upon american strawberries: Bigger, less fragile, less sweet, less tasty. They hybridised the two kinds and got today's garden strawberries.
Not sure if it's even close to what really happened, but thought I'd share :) as I found it interesting when I was told about "fregoline di bosco"
> The garden strawberry was first bred in Brittany, France, in the 1750s via a cross of Fragaria virginiana from eastern North America and Fragaria chiloensis, which was brought from Chile.
Its the economy of scale that ruins our food. Agriculture is 2% of our economy. Better taste etc would cost more. Its a free-market spiral where a thing can be made a little cheaper but gets a little worse, until all you can buy is crap for almost nothing.
Or switch to boutique products (food, furniture, whatever) that costs 10X - 100X more than the commodity stuff.
But don't economies of scale still say that you can improve prices for good tasting food by scaling up from the small farms? Maybe that just gets taken to the extreme year over year when people focus on constantly increasing profit.
After I moved to California (quite recently) I was shocked by the quality of food here, compared to Europe. In fact I think most of so called "American cuisine" are actually workarounds for that poor quality.
They use enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently kills the taste of everything underneath.
They use toasters, because American bread tastes like it was made of sawdust mixed with gum, and toasting it makes it taste slightly better.
They grill a lot of things for the same reason.
They eat a lot of eggs, because it is almost impossible to cook them wrong :)
And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by. I've actually been to a Walmart which, despite being huge (200k sqft) have not sold any fresh vegetables at all.
I don’t know which part of California you’re in, but this certainly isn’t true of the cuisine in San Francisco. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a restaurant that used ketchup on anything but fries or burgers.
I’ve had plenty of bad food in France and Italy by the way, you can get bad stuff anywhere.
Judging a nations cuisine by personal anecdotes is not very rational.
And Walmart is not really a grocery produce store. If you want fresh vegetables, go to your local grocer, farmers market, or atleast a Whole Foods. I mean if you’re going to Walmart to buy vegetables, perhaps your buying “American cuisine” at the wrong places too. Anyplace slathering ketchup on stuff is fast food or fast casual, or a really shitty restaurant.
Actually I'd say it is very much true of most San Francisco cuisine and produce which is ridiculously overrated. You can go to an average restaurant in Paris run by some working class schmuck and get Chez Panisse tier food for half the price or less.
I'm not sure how you're supposed to judge a nation's cuisine by anything but personal anecdotes, unless you have some metric for noticing American tomatoes taste like paste, and Italian ones don't.
You could start by having double blind taste tests. People love to wax on about their taste abilities and end up failing in real experiments. French wines always beat California wines Until they did the Judgement of Paris blind test and were shocked to find California wines topped all categories.
This whole discussion reminds me of the Conan O’Brien running skit where his “Producer”, an over the top Europhile, is constantly commenting on how everything is better.
There have been some outstanding wines produced in California. I know they exist but I haven't tasted them since they are way outside of my price range.
But for $15 / €12, you can buy excellent wines in France. In the US at that price range, it is extremely rare to find good wines. Just like strawberries, it's about the appearance (the bottle, the label, the name) and not the flavor.
I'm sure the California vintners association was able to gin up some propaganda stunt where they came out on top on a stacked deck. I think their hooch mostly tastes like berries cut with paint thinner, and for equivalent price I was always able to get a much better wine from just about anywhere else even when I was shopping in California. Could be the vintners are all barbarians, or just their property taxes make decent wine at a decent price to be non-possible.
Literally the only people I have ever met who think SF or California in general have food worth barking about are people who live there and don't get out much. For America even a small place like Portland Maine is vastly more interesting, better quality ingredients and better in general.
Maine more interesting? Maine is mostly white. California is far far more racially diverse and the cuisine is a result of a large number of immigrants and cultures mixing. I doubt you’ll get any comparable Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, or oodles of other ethnic cuisines there, nor the countless fusions that have been produced. From a variety standpoint there’s no way Maine compares.
SF has the most restaurants per capita of any city in the US.
Your comments basically sound like snobbery to me, and unjustified by anything other than personal opinion and anecdote.
>Maine more interesting? Maine is mostly white. California is far far more racially diverse and the cuisine
Lol, yes, because white people don't know how to cook anything. Great argument. I guess you've never been to Maine.
>SF has the most restaurants per capita of any city in the US.
Obviously having the most of something means they're the best!
I agree: I am a snob -I think SF is bloody awful and people who say "the food" is something to crow about rarely notice the rivers of human sewage flowing by their restaurants, or the fact that the tomatoes taste like paste.
Not sure. The hypermarket I grew up going to had 80 (eighty) checkout lanes and sold everything you'd find at a Walmart Supercenter, but with way more selection.
As for the food sections in a typical grocery store in the US (Kroger, Publix, Albertsons, Safeway), it is laughably tiny and the quality is depressing.
Carrefour has got a lot of different sized shops, with the smallest in city center with size of less than 50 sq meters. Of course if you've taken the average size of only the big ones, then the difference is quite big.
My take on Bay Area food culture is that people are too caught up in the rat race to perceive the difference between good food and expensive food.
This results in inflated prices and inconsistent quality, with an emphasis on over-salting, sugaring, buttering things (as the lowest-common-denominator market demands).
I understand why you are being downvoted because to label a whole countries cuisine as being bad is a massive generalisation.
But I've got to agree that my experience in New York was pretty similar. Even in a fine dinning steak house, the steak was hidden by a 'salt crust' which made it practically impossible for me to enjoy it. In an Italian the tomato sauces were so sweet they reminded me of the sauce you'd have with baked beans. Everything was just over done in one way or another.
> In an Italian the tomato sauces were so sweet they reminded me of the sauce you'd have with baked beans.
On the other hand, most -if not all- of tomato sauces in the UK are so acidic that Spaniards living in the UK are importing tomato sauce from Spain (as it has a bit of added sugar). It might be similar with actual Italians, so maybe this example is just that you're used to your way of having tomato sauce :)
True. I understand that drinks manufactures adapt their products to suit different markets. The Fanta "Orange" I've seen in Europe seems paler and possibly less sweet compared to the ones in Africa. I wouldn't be surprised if Coke tasted slightly different depending on which part of the world you happen to be.
UK Fanta contains orange juice and sweetener because of the sugar tax. Had international Fanta (possibly American or Arabic) on a Qatar Airways flight and it was bright orange with no real fruit, and most importantly, sweet and I felt satisfied after half a cup.
Coke does taste differently - the ingredients are different even across Europe. I always look forward to visiting Germany because I always bring a 4-pack back.
Every Walmart I've been to has fresh produce. But to your point, if you want a large variety of fresh produce for cheap you go to an ethnic food store. Around Atlanta that would be the Asian and Mexican grocery stores, which are as large as Walmart, stocked majority of produce. It's bustling with customers, carts full of produce.
The produce section at Walmart is actually larger than my local so called grocery stores (Kroger, Publix...)... Where carts are full of cereal and other non perishable food.
On the topic of strawberries, they would be half the price at the ethnic super markets.
I somewhat disagree with the statement grilling takes the taste and hides the freshness. I would say that to frying. If you go to your local "seafood" restaurant most of the menu is fried this, fried that.
> And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by
Nearly everything you said is incorrect, this one in particular. Vegetables are not expensive in the US compared to other nations of similar incomes.
The US is a leading producer of vegetables such as cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, squash, potatoes (/tuber), onions, turnips, soybeans, carrots, pumpkins and tomatoes (/fruit). Globally the US is third in vegetable production, behind China and India. For one example, the US produces about 15% of all lettuce globally (with 4% of the world population). Vegetables are more than plentiful in the US, we unfortunately waste enormous amounts of vegetables.
The US consumes more vegetables per capita than these European nations:
US vegetable consumption is almost identical to the average of the EU. It's also essentially identical to the consumption in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Interesting fact: the poorest countries in Europe typically consume 50% to 100% more vegetables per capita than the wealthiest countries in Europe.
> Interesting fact: the poorest countries in Europe typically consume 50% to 100% more vegetables per capita than the wealthiest countries in Europe.
This is indeed interesting, but I guess vegs are mostly grown on poorer countries (except Netherlands I suppose), so it's cheap and easy to buy local vegs. Also, mediterranean/southern european countries (Italy, Spain, Greece - poorer than their northern neighbours) have different diets than northern countries. Less meat and more tomato/olives/uncooked stuff as the climate doesn't require to ingest as many calories as in the north.
I used to live in an area where was-marts were built out very densely, probably a dozen super-centers within easy driving distance. When the stores first open they tend to have really great produce, then after six weeks or so everything falls off, and your left with overripe/wilting produce, and the fruit flys are like a plague. After seeing this pattern a number of times I decided that the good produce goes to store openings, then once people develop a habit of going to the store they start sending the good produce to the next store opening.
Agreed its usually quantity over quality. California is perhaps freshest and tasiest in the nation, with the healthier lifestyles, local farms and Mexican influence. You should try the midwest.
> And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by. I've actually been to a Walmart which, despite being huge (200k sqft) have not sold any fresh vegetables at all.
Going to call shenanigans on your claims. Vegetables and fruits in California are quite cheap, especially the organic and heritage types because they're grown locally here.
And having eaten European food, I would say the quality of most of it is trash. The French drown their dishes in butter because that's the only thing that makes their food palatable. British, Irish, and Scottish food simply isn't unless you're drunk, which explains their proclivity for drinking at every meal. And Italian food? It's best ingredient comes from America...
You apparently didn't eat much proper food in France or Italy beyond some take-away junkfood or maybe some obscure highly local cuisine without any clue what you're ordering, otherwise I can't explain such a disconnect from reality. UK food generally is not considered haute-cuisine by anybody so that's a weird comparison.
But then your post is full or weird stuff - organic local food being "especially cheap" doesn't make much sense, when everywhere this is the most expensive category due to extra costs on whole process of growing/treatment/transport
Before I went in-house, I counted a number of Michelin-starred chefs as clients and I ate at most of their restaurants. I know what good food can taste like. While in France, I ate at a variety of highly-regarded local sit-down restaurants, expecting truly amazing food. I was not impressed, nor was anyone else in my group.
The ingredients were about on par with organic vegetables available at my local grocery store. (I live in a nice part of California, so we have better access to fresh organic heritage vegetables than almost anywhere else in the world--including Europe.)
While the food certainly looked much fancier than what I normally in in America, and the cooking was far better executed than most American restaurants, on a flavor basis it was merely average. Quite simply, I've had more flavorful food at a taco stand.
Well you basically answer yourself in your last sentence - neither French nor Italian cuisine is aiming for similar taste experience as some taco stand. Since you are so mightily experienced, you for sure know that french cuisine is generally regarded as best in the world due to many reasons. That's a general comparison obviously, so picking some specific places here & there the comparison can end up differently.
You can also try to compare it to indian cuisine for example, which is fabulous for many people (including me) and reasons, but an attempt to compare those is an indication that you don't really have a clue about whole haute-cuisine experience. And lets not forget you considered some of British cuisine as something to compared to, which is... a bit clueless, isn't it.
But its good that you enjoy tacos, that's clearly more your type of experience.
This lines up with my anecdotal experience of watermelons.
Watermelons used to be quite large, and packed with large, dark seeds. From these, I learned what watermelons taste like. At some point, I think in the late 1980s or early 1990s, growers started selling seedless watermelons in increasing numbers. We never bought these, because they were generally inferior in taste and texture. But they were easy to cut up, and to put into a fruit salad without getting any watermelon seeds in it. As time went on, the seeded shelf space decreased, and seedless increased. Then they started getting smaller in the 2000s.
Now, you cannot find a full-sized, genuinely watermelon-flavored watermelon in the supermarket. They are all these tiny, muskmelon-sized seedless orbs, with pale pink flesh that is vaguely reminiscent of a watermelon--like a sweeter, pinker cucumber. And these disappointing little 5# sterile triploid things cost the same as a full-blown 20# "real" watermelon.
The small strawberries are still available--sometimes. It is readily apparent that growers are still experimenting with different cultivars. I really only want two things from strawberries. I want them to taste like strawberry, and I want them to not be covered with mold the day after I buy them. The big ones seem to last longer, but the small ones generally taste better. So I don't see a clear winner there yet. If I had the choice, I'd probably buy the smaller ones and save the longer-lasting species for table fruit later in the week. But this puts the strawberry in direct competition with other fruits that tend to go moldy faster. The produce manager probably wants fruit that can stay on display long enough to get sold rather than go moldy before someone can pay for them. So my preference doesn't matter.
It isn't really that "people" prefer to buy them, but that supermarket produce managers prefer to sell them. People generally don't get two different varieties to choose from. If they want "strawberries", they buy what the store stocked, or they don't. And the store wants to stock fruits that bruise less easily, grow redder, hold more water, and rot more slowly. Just like with the tomatoes.
The "pick your own" places could cater to consumer preferences, but those will be shaped by what has been available to them previously. The "self pick" farms are only open during the local growing season, while the grocery stores are importing the varieties they prefer all year. The stores train them to seek out firm, shiny red, gigantic strawberries.
The strawberry farmer that gave me that answer did, in fact, have both for sale in a farmer’s market, and the answer was in response to the inquiry why he has about 5 times the shelf space dedicated to the large strawberries.
I guess I should count myself lucky that I can still get full size seeded and full size seedless watermelons, with essentially no difference in flavor (seeded are indeed a little sweeter, but not by much). Also, they are quite red, dark red if ripe-on-the-edge-of-spoiling, but decent red with still about a week or so of shelf life.
The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.