To think food tastes very different now ie. worse

[JeffsanArsehole]

I'm sure there are dozens/hundreds of reasons but to me food doesn't taste the same. Even high quality food, even home grown veg and fruit (which I grow a lot of)

It's weird, but to me it seems like the earth is exhausted or summat and things just don't taste as good/fresh/unpolluted

Does anyone agree with me or am I barking?

I buy most of our family's food at markets and from specialists - butcher/baker/greengrocer/fishmonger/dairy etc. And cook! It's the only way to eat well, I find.

Totally agree about tomatoes, but they've been flavourless in the uk for a long time now. I remember the tomatoes in Spain when I was a child looking awful but tasting amazing. Now they also seem to be grown for their looks rather than their taste.

Well, it's either every item of food in the world that's changed, or your tastebuds.

Which do you think it is more likely to be?

Tomatoes in supermarkets are mostly if not exclusively grown in water, not soil. Hydropnics. And they all taste crap.

If you grow F1 tomatoes, or the most common Moneymakers, they are not grown for taste, but for regularity.

If on the oher hand, you grow organic heritage varieties, you can look forward to a taste sensation. I currently have the most amazing varieties growing, including one that is as big as a melon and ones that are tiny but mighty, all fed on comfrey juice and all tasting sensational. Red, yellow, purple, stripey - all amazing.

I wonder if it's possible to find other old, "pure" breeds of fruit and veg and then grow them in natural home-made compost? Would taste better.

Yes, because people like the Heritage Seed Library started saving old varieties of seed and regrew them, and shared them out, to enable lots of us to grow old varieties and [more importantly] to allow them to adapt with the changing times so that they are continually evolving with each growing year. Some of us are Seed Guardians who look after, and grow a variety or several varieties of seed, just to save them and send them back to the HSL for their members to access.

www.gardenorganic.org.uk/hsl

Lots of fruit and veg cultivars have been developed to make them disease resistant, longer shelf life, prettier looking, and somewhere along the way the flavours have been changed, so YANBU with freely available varieties. There are still older varieties around if you search, and have the money to pay the premium for the high levels of spoilage and relatively low yields which make these less financially rewarding for the producers/distributors, so YABU so say that everything tastes more bland than it used to.

Carrots are the worst. The taste chemical.

The soil in rural Italy is likely to be as depleted as in the UK, but in a different way. So not used for mass farming but not necessarily nutrient rich. They suffer erosion, small patches of land have supported families for generations, etc etc. Their only advantage is sun, which of course does make a differernce when it comes to growing fruit and veg.

I remember being mindblown by a tomato in Greece when I went on holiday there a few years ago. I hadn't even thought of Greece as a place you go for the food particularly, but I had a salad with a knobbly, sliced tomato in it and it tasted AMAZING! But I don't find tomatoes in the UK taste weird or slimy as OP describes - they just taste watery/tasteless. The worst are "normal" average sized tomatoes and you get better taste from the posher cherry tomatoes or big ridged ones.

I really miss baked potatoes from when I was little. The skin was really thick, like a walnut shell, and they were delicious. Baked potatoes these days are often pretty tasteless.

MakeItRain Just buy a different potato, potatoes have varieties, find one you like and ignore the supermarkets "best for ..."

If you're growing your own, it's not because soil is "depleted" that they taste not like you want, it's because you're not growing the right varieties!

If you've ever tried home grown potatoes, carrots of tomatoes it is very difficult to go back to eating the shit they sell in tesco. It's the same with meat; buy meat at a decent local butcher who treats his animals well in life and death and supermarket meat will never taste proper again.

If only I could afford butcher meat all the time!

I was coming on to post about the Heritage Seed Library/Garden Organic, but I've just seen somebody else already has, so I second their recommendation! My dad is a member and some of the veg he's grown from their seeds is mind-blowing.

so did chicken which was a luxury we only had at Christmas because it wasn't mass produced.

This makes me think that food tasted better because we had less of it and less often. Now most will have chicken once a week (and if it's an MN chicken it'll last all week too) and the 'rarity' of the taste will have gone. Tomatoes are tasteless now, but then we eat them all year round. Soft fruits are tasteless as well, but then we have them all year round too, rather than as a seasonal treat.

This is one of mine in a polytunnel - from a swap with someone in the USofA. It is just turning pinky red, turned a bit more today. The size of a melon. Can't wait to tuck into one of these.