Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point.
Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?"
The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did.
That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry.
Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes.
Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)
"GMO" is a red herring. When it comes to produce, the problem isn't that it's mass-produced and it isn't that it's mutated with secret Monsanto DNA.
The problem is that huge companies have conditioned the market to believe that tomatoes are something you get in the bin 15 steps forward and 5 steps sideways from the entrance to the supermarket, in the big bin labeled "vine-ripened tomatoes", when in fact tomatoes don't work that way, and anything you put in a bin labeled like that must, by necessity because of the way supply chains work, be a fake wax replica of a tomato even when good tomatoes are available.
The problem is not that poor people eat tomatoes. The Fresh Markets supermarket 3 blocks north of me serves a solidly lower-lower class market (I live next to Austin, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, a "food desert") has better produce than Whole Foods does. Poor people, particularly Hispanic poor people, do veg really well.
The problem is that the Del Monte's of the world are replacing real tomatoes with fake tomatoes. That is bad. It's not a class warfare issue.
You're living in a fantasy world. No city in the US is so corrupt as to allow a large supermarket to sell globs of paraffin and beeswax as "tomatoes." Those are actual tomatoes. If you have a real criticism of them, your hyperbole or delusion seriously undermines it, and you neglected to state it.
Is your complaint that they taste bad because they're out of season? Maybe you could be a little clearer still; the connection you're claiming between the labeling of the bin and the flavor of the tomatoes remains obscure.
A "real" tomato does not ship well. It is delicate, prone to bruising, and has a limited shelf-life after it reaches peak ripeness. It is a marvelous treat, but unless you grow your own you will never have a great tomato and unless you have access to a source like a farmers market or quality produce department you will never even know a "good" tomato.
The tomato you see in the bin at a major supermarket chain was picked when it was green and hard as an apple. To get it to the soft consistency and reddish color you expect it was bathed in ethylene gas during shipment or while it was sitting around in a warehouse somewhere. This gas causes the tomato to soften and turn red, but it does not cause the tomato to create the sweet sugars and pleasant consistency that are the hallmarks of a freshly picked ripe tomato. It is this waxy/mealy consistency of a gassed mass-market tomato that was being noted.
I hear you on the differences. I've had tomatoes from my mom's garden, and they're a completely different beast than what one finds in the supermarket. With that said, supermarket romas are my snack of choice: tasty, affordable, healthy. Even in the dead of winter when they're all beat up and expensive. I love them and they keep me away from candy bars. :)
If you don't like "mass market" tomatoes, you don't have to buy them. But I do and I will. Implying that I'm ignorant for my choice or that the world would be a better place if my snack of choice didn't exist doesn't strike me as kindness. Seems more likely to be rooted in pride.
Food evangelists always strike me as pride all dressed up as virtue, anyway. If they were really out to make the world a better place, shouldn't they be building technology, fighting for just laws, healing the sick and poor, that kind of thing? Children are starving in Africa and they're bothering rich people about not eating sufficiently expensive tomatoes.
Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?"
The big picture reasoning for that is here:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Char...
The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did.
That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry.
Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes.
Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)