And I’ve got a dozen tomato plants growing. I was hoping to have enough romas to process, but I feel.lime I’m going to regret this many plants.
Berries in general are pretty bad out of season. I had a pint of blueberries a few months ago (late winter) that were soooo gritty. 
I regrettably couldn’t finish it.
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+1 on the Campari tomatoes. They appear to be magical like the cavendish. The ones from Costco are usually decently ripe, but I have also bought packages that are still a bit orange, and they will become perfect delicious tomatoes in a few days.
US Produce has gone downhill since Covid. Even all the farmers markets/stands near me are the same shit that the big grocery stores sell, usually just a bit closer to going off or a bit uglier.
This is the ‘one simple trick’ that happens at our local farmers’ market. Some of the stands are local folks selling produce they dug out of the ground locally. A lot of others are just people that go to a large food terminal in Toronto, buy pallets of produce on the verge of spoiling, and put it in their booths. It’s generally pretty obvious who’s a family farm and who’s not ,but I guess some people get fooled.
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One of the nice things about living in the exurbs is that it’s extremely viable to subscribe to the harvest of a local farm. Once a week, I run by the farm, pick up our share of the veggies/fruit/herbs that was harvested…
Admittedly that’s limited to whatever’s in season locally, and it doesn’t work all year. But it beats the disappointment of the nearby supermarkets.
There was a nice small stand that ran from April through 11/1 near my house. They shut down a couple years ago as the property they set up on was sold to be developed. They did regularly have edible tomatoes July-August that were quite good, but the nice tomatoes seemed to disappear during COVID.
I thought maybe this was related to the labor shortage, but perhaps it was just the final nail in the coffin for many small farms.
Most people are not willing to pay $5 for a pound of tomatoes or strawberries. Selling boxes of these out of the back of a truck for two weeks a year is not a viable business.
Lots of cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and turnips.
There’ll be a lot of NL cod available this year with the quota doubling.
Saskatoon berries are the same thing. They get called Juneberries as well. If you drive along forest roads, you’ll potentially see a tallish shrub with purple berries along the side of the road, possible around now. The leaves are part way between circular and ovoid. They’re probably my favourite berry, absolutely delicious in pie.
If you go looking, make a point of tasting the berries before commiting to picking them. Some bushes have better tasting berries than others. The weird orange spikey berries have a fungus. Don’t eat those ones. Other berries on the same bush are fine to eat.
I try to support local farmers markets for produce - it’s usually great quality, and also lower prices.
In NJ, even my local large supermarket (ShopRite) gets tomatoes from local farmers, and the quality is great.
There are some things that the quality is so obviously lower when getting from the large chains. Asparagus comes to mind - large stores have tiny, thin stalks, and the color looks washed out. At a market, they’re much thicker, with a much deeper color.
I do appreciate that ShopRite does bring in local produce for many items.
I grew up on Macs, Red Delicious and Granny Smiths but abandoned them with the wave of better-tasting apples that have been introduced in recent decades. Clear improvement in taste quality.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/new-apple-varieties-1.7383868
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Tomatoland is a great book on this topic
Such marketing comedy.
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Related, I’m friends with a woman who grew up on the original John McIntosh farm. Back home every farm.had an old McIntosh apple tree.
The farm is now in disrepair, and the Mac trees are gone in a lot of places. And I think some of the orchards have closed. Yeah, the last 10-20, apple taste and quality has improved a lot. Fuji apples are superb for example.
So are they really just saying that ultraprocessed foods taste better than the home cooking of the test subjects?
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I think thats part of it.
Takes time to cook home meals from scratch.
Thats really the main impediment for most people. Also, you have to have decent cooking skills to create something that tastes on par with an ultra-peocessed healthy option.
Most people will follow the path of least resistance and go for ultra-processed option.
Please move to the “Studies with Obvious Results” thread.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
How exactly does one define “ultraprocessed” for the purpose of this study?
Milk for example is processed by the cow, so what is it considered?