Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).
Tomatoes are, imo, the prime example and possibly the only one of popular produce, of bland produce in the US.
I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.
I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.
Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.
Tomatoes are different though. I barely knew what a tomato tasted like. I didn't like them because they were tasteless (when combined with sny other food) and slimy.
It isn't that homegrown tomatoes just taste better, they actually have taste.
I mean, in most of the US, they're an extremely seasonal product. If you go to Pete's (a commodity big-box grocery chain in Chicago) in August, you'll get very good tomatoes. There's basically nowhere you're going to go to get very good fresh tomatoes (maybe cherry tomatoes) in April.
"Plastic" tomatoes has nothing to do with their nutritional score or inclusion of dangerous compounds. It's just a cheaper tomato variety with thicker skin and most likely harvested early, to be conditioned on the shelf. So these so called "plastic" tomatoes, or some fancy expensive ones have exact same level of harmful chemicals in EU - none at all. That was my point, that this safety level is accessible to poor and rich, regardless of their money.
My wife doesn’t let me buy tomatoes in winter. And even summer tomatoes are bland in comparison to the ones one would get in a mediterran region or the ones she grows in our garden. It’s not even the same ballpark.
