Hello Mark,

I'd assume, that the tomatoes right now come either from glass houses or from

a great distance: Mexiko, southern California?

Both methods imply different brands/sorts of tomatoes and often some premature

harvest to cope for the long transport time.

I dream of the tomatoes my parents grew in their garden, picked just

ahead of eating. 

Georg

Georg is quite right of course. Even if we happened to know the details, it would take some specialist knowledge to tell which breeds of tomato and which treatment protocols were appropriate to particular circumstances. Laymen seldom realise just how technical modern farming and marketing have become. And watch this space! I do not say this in the usual tone of criticism; the technology is important, difficult, and in all realistic circumstances, praiseworthy, but the realities have to be faced in their various contexts.

To various extents, some varieties are bred for keeping qualities and suitable shapes for packing (I kid you not! And I am not referring to the likes of cubic watermelons grown into that shape in moulds. We still do not have cubic tomatoes or grapes, but you will note that many of the shapes in supermarket packages are far from the traditional tomato shape.)

Now, the qualities of such fruit and vegetables, though they look fine on the shelf, tend to suffer slightly in terms of flavour, bouquet, texture (leathery skin and so on) and no doubt slightly in terms of nutrition as well. Perhaps once the shape, size, and toughness have become sufficiently well established, breeders will be able to start concentrating on otherwise irrelevant factors such as taste and aroma. It is not too late to hope. I hesitate to speak too soon, but I get the impression that commercial strawberries are beginning to improve after about a 50 year hiatus during which they grew larger and tasted more and more like straw and smelt less and less like anything.

As for the nutrition, I would not worry too much. Vegetable material that has been stored instead of being eaten straight off the vine will not suffer measurably in terms of mineral content (and I refer only to volatile minerals such as nitrogen, and even those are not likely to differ measurably in any fruit or vegetable in any condition that you are likely to enjoy eating.) The longer they are stored, the lower the content of vitamin C and possibly vitamin A and a few other vitamins are likely to be, but the difference is not likely to be of any practical importance to yor health. Even dried fruit, if it has not been exposed to too much air and sunlight, is still a fair source of vitamins C and A, which are two of the most likely to be lost.

No, I agree with Georg that the main problem is taste and bouquet. Say what you like; there is no matching anything from the supermarket or even the vegetable market, with a sun-warmed tomato in a delicate atmosphere of disturbed tomato leaves. This may be an acquired taste, but acquired or not it has no substitute. On the other hand tree fruits...

If you haven't eaten ripe apricots, figs, or lychees straight from the tree, or better still, in the tree, there is something missing from your experience of life.