In the early 1990’s I could still find quince. I’m not a fan of quince, but just saying. Pattypan squash has been more or less gone. But I did find some a few weeks ago for the first time in years at a greengrocer. It was marked local grown.
American chestnut has been gone for years. There used to be a greengrocer that would buy American chestnuts from a local picker. But that stopped years ago when the picker died.
Italian chestnuts that were not soaked in poison…GONE.
Tasty bananas from the 1970s…GONE.
Peaches with fuzz on them…GONE.
Edible plums…GONE.
Small, tasty papayas from the 1980s…GONE
What fruits or vegetables have more or less gone extinct in the stores within your life?
Gooseberries have basically vanished here in the UK. Used to be everywhere, now you only really find them at farm shops or grow your own. Same with proper Discovery apples, the ones that were almost translucent red when ripe. Supermarkets just don’t want anything with a short shelf life.
Not only long shelf lives, they even irradiate some to sterilize so you cannot use the seeds to grow.
New property developments only plant foreign useless trees, no fruit trees, and with a special obsession about lawns. As a kid, everyone had yards with fruit trees, now very few have. You must buy everything.
On the balance this is actually an incredibly good thing.
They irritate them to prevent the spread of pests and diseases. There are roughly 10,000 species of fruit flies around the world, for example. Irradiating imported fruit is a vital step in stopping the spread of different fruit flies and other things.
Live seeds can be imported in most countries work proper documentation and inspection. Mostly. Admitted, that’s an area that could be improved as it’s often quite difficult.
Consumer habits are likely a factor. Many people are offended when blueberries end up in muffins and pancakes. My wife frequently witnesses colleagues picking blueberries out of their muffins supplied by their employer for staff breakfast.
hm.. my stores have everythign on this list besides american chestnuts (i assume what I see are chinese chestnuts). you dont have peaches? Or plums? I mean theyre not theyre year round but all summer they are.
Bananas i guess are different but we have red banana, cavendish, some sort of thai banana, manzana banana, and burro banana even at mainstream stores.
Quince are there which always confuses me. what are people even doing with those. i never see anyone buy them
My brother lives in a very old town founded in the late 1700s and one thing I noticed is every property has apple trees going down the entire main stretch of town. The property he owns had a small orchard back in the day. This is something I’ve yet to see at a single new build property. He also has very mature chestnut trees (likely some Chinese hybrid) that produced heavily since he moved there 12 years ago every single year but 1.
That’s crazy, I can’t comprehend someone being dismayed at the inclusion of blueberries. I know many people think I’m strange because of how passionate I am about growing as much as I can and being self-sustaining. When my options are a blackberry bush for $7 or a small amount of crop for the same price, I’ll always choose to grow it myself.
I will say, yeah a few things have dropped off the shelves size I was younger, but they’ve been more than made up for by all the new stuff that was impossible to get before.
Who maintains them? Or do they mostly just collect disease?
I feel like most fruit trees are more like equipment than ornament. It’s cool if every house on the street owns their own tractor, but is it actually optional and beneficial?
It’s different for very low maintenance fruiting plants, but that’s a fairly short list in most locations.
I should mention these are in their backyards, not something the city or town planted but rather the old trees left from a bunch of small orchards. They remain maintained by the owners, some removed them but I always like to ask for the apples if people just let them rot. The deer make short work of any fallen fruit there.
Those have always been there, apart from the new pests generated, and they were never a problem. I know, we had a large orchard as kids and seldom seen bad fruit. Nowadays the peaches are 10mm and already dripping with gum.
There was a “new” mealy worm announced here a while back, but don’t worry, the poison for it is already on the shelf, just as “bird flue” magically appeared here in 2006 ?. And it is illegal to immune your birds against it.
Try to grow some prickly pears, you have to hose the cochineal off every second day because food colouring (they feed you the bugs) is more important than the fruit.
And the funguses appearing on everything is just un be lievable. It’s like the 50 plagues of Egypt.
As far as I’m concerned (nearly) all edible fruit is gone from the grocery stores in my area. There is virtually no fruit I will purchase from local grocery stores as it is all garbage. Unripened and tasteless crap, that provides as much enjoyment as eating cardboard.
The only fruits I will buy are tropical such as banana, mango, and citrus. I’m sure they’re probably not even close in taste to those fruits when grown/ripened in their native habitat. However, never having tasted tropical fruit grown and ripened in its natural home environment my palette doesn’t know the difference anyway.
Virtually no produce in my local stores are good, or affordable. Tomatoes, being one of the worst. For those old enough to remember how food was before there was such a thing as big box stores, the difference is unbelievable nowadays.
None of what they sell today is worth buying, even at half the price.
It depends on where you shop here. Someone at Krogers loves top quality apples as they rarely have bad ones. Even the dollar grocery store has decent if smaller apples at least half the time. Other stores seem content to sell bland and flavorless market apples though. Pears{good ones} can be a hard find in stores. Our Mexican grocers sell quite a few unusual fruits. Including the extremely hard, blah tasting Quince look alike. Perfect size and shape to throw though…lol No one buys store bought tomatoes here. Too many high quality road side sellers. Or you avail yourself to the wonderful you pick operations.
Sadly, I’m near the end of the food supply chain in Canada. I live on a small island off the coast of our largest island in British Columbia. Even big box store grocery produce on Vancouver Island is far better than the stuff that gets shipped to our corner of Canada. Luckily we have a great climate for growing our own fruit and veggies so farmers markets or farm stands offer great alternatives. I have planted at least 70+ fruit trees over the last five years, so my tasteless fruit problem is almost resolved (most of my trees are almost in production).
I can see that with out of season stuff imported from countries on the other side of the equator sure, but in season I don’t personally see as big a quality difference. Right now I’m perfectly happy with the watermelons, cucumbers, pears, blackberries, root vegetables and brassicas, nicer apple varieties, fresh herbs, alliums, and leafy greens. Do better ones exist? Sure. Were those better ones ever available in my region or possibly to grow here at all? No.
When the season does roll around, I’m routinely impressed by the quality of the satsumas, sumo mandarins, cara cara oranges, in state apples, blueberries, cherries, and specialty grapes, and can generally find good strawberries, blueberries, muscadines, mangos, beans and peas in the pod, plums, and in good years the stone fruits.
Better stores carry legitimately good cherry and heirloom tomatoes that are better than what I can personally grow like nine or ten months out of the year. The gripe about tomatoes is honestly out of date, or it comes from people who only buy cheap paste tomatoes at Walmart or something.
Not to mention the avocados, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, bunch grapes, guavas, papayas, yucca, mamey sapote, and grapefruit I can pick up at the store now, all things that are pretty good this time of year but simply can’t be grown in my region at all and so would be off the menu without big box stores and the associated long supply chains.
Big box stores became common in the 1960s, more then a half century ago. We’re about 10 years away from the point where no one will remember the days before them. And we’re about 30 years past the point where the memories of the people who did remember that long ago were fresh enough to be reliable.
But yeah, going out in December and buying a plum or raspberries grown in South America is going to be disappointing. And the cheaper tomatoes and out of season imported ones are tasteless, sure, but it’s not like that’s the only thing you ever can get at the grocery store.
Your experience in the US, sounds very much different than many places outside the very largest cities in Canada back in the day
I can not remember any big box stores in Canada in the 60’s and 70’s. We were still ordering many items from the Sears catalogue in rural Canada back then. There were certainly no Walmart or other big chain stores in proximity to where I lived back then. The closest thing to that was Eaton’s (long since gone), or Simpson Sears, or the Hudson Bay Company, (recently bankrupt after 300 years in operation). The HBC is the most recent of the long list of casualties of competing against the big box stores and more recently the Internet here in Canada.
I can’t remember any big box stores anywhere near where I lived until the 80’s in my neck of the woods in Canada (and no we didn’t live in an igloo near the Arctic circle back in the day).
It sounds like your shopping experience living in the US, is quite diffent than in my part of Canada.
The best stores I ever saw for massive in stock selection of fruits and veggies were the humongous Cub Food Warehouses in Atlanta. You could easily go into stupor overload trying to decide what you would buy. Like the apple section was 75 to 100 foot long alone.
