cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
What’s the Difference Between Heirloom, Beefsteak, Plum, Cherry, and Grape Tomatoes? - Eater
And one more question: Why are grocery store tomatoes so bad?
We’re in the season of Peak Tomato, and the tomato sandwiches and caprese salads and just-barely-cooked sauces await. But let’s first take a slight detour from our guiding question to ask another one: Why are grocery-store tomatoes so bad?
There are two major categories of tomatoes: heirlooms, which we’ll cover below, and hybrids. The tomatoes you’ll find year-round in the grocery store are hybrids, which means that humans have cultivated and bred them for specific characteristics. Not all hybrids are bad, but the grocery-store ones are; they’re bred for resistance to diseases, firm flesh, thick skin, and storage potential, rather than, say, juiciness or flavor. They’re also yanked from the vine while they’re still green — and therefore hard as rocks — so that they don’t get crushed while they circumvent the globe to their final destination. Once there, they are sprayed with ethylene gas that induces reddening and softening — but off the vine, they can’t develop the sugars and acids and other flavor/aroma chemicals that make tomatoes actually taste good. So you get watery, cottony pucks, instead of the mind-bending globes of wonder that you’ll find at the greenmarket in the summer.
And one more question: Why are grocery store tomatoes so bad?
We’re in the season of Peak Tomato, and the tomato sandwiches and caprese salads and just-barely-cooked sauces await. But let’s first take a slight detour from our guiding question to ask another one: Why are grocery-store tomatoes so bad?
There are two major categories of tomatoes: heirlooms, which we’ll cover below, and hybrids. The tomatoes you’ll find year-round in the grocery store are hybrids, which means that humans have cultivated and bred them for specific characteristics. Not all hybrids are bad, but the grocery-store ones are; they’re bred for resistance to diseases, firm flesh, thick skin, and storage potential, rather than, say, juiciness or flavor. They’re also yanked from the vine while they’re still green — and therefore hard as rocks — so that they don’t get crushed while they circumvent the globe to their final destination. Once there, they are sprayed with ethylene gas that induces reddening and softening — but off the vine, they can’t develop the sugars and acids and other flavor/aroma chemicals that make tomatoes actually taste good. So you get watery, cottony pucks, instead of the mind-bending globes of wonder that you’ll find at the greenmarket in the summer.