The reason some vegetables (particularly tomatoes) taste fairly subpar in the United States is because of the journey they make to reach your salad. If the tomatoes are coming from across the country (or Mexico, or another nation) they are actually picked prematurely so instead of ripening on the vine they ripen during transit. If you've ever had a tomato that tastes "mealy" this is the reason.
This mass transportation of food over long distances explains why you can get an orange any time of the year in Boston but also why the quality can be so poor - you're far away from the source.
After moving to San Francsico (from Boston with it's crazy winters) where local produce is available pretty much year-round at the local food Coop, I've noticed a pronounced different in the average quality and notably lower prices.
The advantage of vine-ripening is a myth, as I have discovered first-hand by growing tomatoes in a home garden. For optimal flavor, tomatoes should be picked when they have just a slight blush of color but are still almost entirely green, and then finish ripening OFF the vine. When allowed to ripen on the vine their texture and flavor suffer - they tend to taste and feel almost rotten.
The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.
Outdoor grown pot (for me) is way better than greenhouse or indoor grown pot. Same for tomatoes - if you have the chance, grow your own. Outdoor tomatoes are way way tastier than the mass produced industrial crap.
I think that we don't understand plants' needs at all... just let the plants grow naturally.
My default assumption is that "don't try to engineer things to be better" is the wrong answer. If we don't understand it well enough yet, just experiment more until we do. The awesome thing about indoor farming at scale is that it becomes really easy to do lots of experimenting and zero in on exactly what things each plant requires to thrive.
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
>Outdoor tomatoes are way way tastier than the mass produced industrial crap
>just let the plants grow naturally.
You mean that a small crop of plants, grown steps from your door and harvested at an optimal point in time taste better than mass produced vegetables? What a revelation!
Too bad that it's completely unfeasible for 90% of the global population, who live in crowded cities, or work jobs where they can't be tending to their garden, or live in environments where they can't grow produce most of the year.
Do you really think the poor and hungry on the planet care about the fact that the homegrown tomoatoes you're using in your California garden-party salad have slightly more flavour? Let them eat cake!
I agree that mass-produced tomatoes seem to have been bred to also have no flavor. I'm not going to blame this on greenhouses though - there's a local family farm that produces tomatoes that are just as tasty as those from my garden but are available for an extra 3-4 months of the year. (Note that I'm in central Pennsylvania)
We do understand it. It's just most poeple are other constraints and goals. If your goal is to make the most money, and you have a space or legal constraint, then lowering the quality is not your problem.
This seems like a no brainer-- of course it's cheaper to use inputs from freely available outdoor sources rather than metered and/or artificially provided ones. Since these plants evolved in that setting, it works rather well for them.
There are still many important reasons to pursue indoor farming. For one, population dense areas have few other options, especially in a crisis. Perhaps more importantly, space travel, colonizing other moons & planets, or even the radiation-proof underground cities we may need right here on Earth would all depend exclusively on such technology.
Seems like a false dichotomy: why not augment a greenhouse with LED lights?
For some crops, like wine grapes, growers prefer to "dry farm" or use only natural rainfall.
In dry years, however, most are forced to irrigate if nature hasn't provided enough water.
If LED lighting prices (and generation costs) continue to decline, why not "light irrigation" for cloudy climates or latitudes that don't get enough light for a full growing season.
I've learned a lot about growing plants under LEDs talking to them. In the long run space exploration will require us to do a lot of indoor plant cultivation.
Indoor farming is not good for wheat or corn, or really anything where the majority of the plant isn't fragile and/or valuable. Even if we had a mini-wheat without a stem it would be hard to compete with the outdoors. But it's great for leafy vegetables.
Indoor farming will not be cheaper, efficient, or environmentally friendly. It will be more expensive because it has to supply all of its inputs while outdoor farms get a _massive_ energy subsidy from the Sun. The amount of energy required to deliver food from a farm to the grocery is NOTHING compared to the energy we spend getting it from grocery to table; indoor farming will change none of that. It is a delusional pipe-dream from people who do not understand modern agriculture.
The article mentions that the cost of growing wheat indoors would result in an $18 loaf of bread, so there is a breakeven point. If the cost of transportation and water continues to rise that breakeven point will get closer. Saying that it will never work out reminds me of the early 1990s report that the Army did finding that if we used a tiny portion of the Mojave desert to grow Algae, the only inputs of which would be grey water from LA and sun, we could provide enough bio-diesel to take care of all of the USAs transportation needs. But they killed the project because it would only make sense in a world where gas would cost more than $1.50, which would never come.
[+] [-] weisser|10 years ago|reply
This mass transportation of food over long distances explains why you can get an orange any time of the year in Boston but also why the quality can be so poor - you're far away from the source.
After moving to San Francsico (from Boston with it's crazy winters) where local produce is available pretty much year-round at the local food Coop, I've noticed a pronounced different in the average quality and notably lower prices.
[+] [-] mcbrown|10 years ago|reply
The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.
[+] [-] mschuster91|10 years ago|reply
I think that we don't understand plants' needs at all... just let the plants grow naturally.
[+] [-] asuffield|10 years ago|reply
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
[+] [-] forgetsusername|10 years ago|reply
You mean that a small crop of plants, grown steps from your door and harvested at an optimal point in time taste better than mass produced vegetables? What a revelation!
Too bad that it's completely unfeasible for 90% of the global population, who live in crowded cities, or work jobs where they can't be tending to their garden, or live in environments where they can't grow produce most of the year.
Do you really think the poor and hungry on the planet care about the fact that the homegrown tomoatoes you're using in your California garden-party salad have slightly more flavour? Let them eat cake!
[+] [-] smoyer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sametmax|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgetsusername|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] slfnflctd|10 years ago|reply
There are still many important reasons to pursue indoor farming. For one, population dense areas have few other options, especially in a crisis. Perhaps more importantly, space travel, colonizing other moons & planets, or even the radiation-proof underground cities we may need right here on Earth would all depend exclusively on such technology.
[+] [-] kinofcain|10 years ago|reply
For some crops, like wine grapes, growers prefer to "dry farm" or use only natural rainfall.
In dry years, however, most are forced to irrigate if nature hasn't provided enough water.
If LED lighting prices (and generation costs) continue to decline, why not "light irrigation" for cloudy climates or latitudes that don't get enough light for a full growing season.
[+] [-] Symmetry|10 years ago|reply
https://grovelabs.io/
I've learned a lot about growing plants under LEDs talking to them. In the long run space exploration will require us to do a lot of indoor plant cultivation.
[+] [-] lyschoening|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asuffield|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindeasis|10 years ago|reply
Indoor farming will be much more cheaper, efficient, and more environmentally friendly.
Imagine how much transportation is required to deliver food from a farm to the grocery to your table.
[+] [-] evgen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindeasis|10 years ago|reply
Downvotes do not give enough information.
[+] [-] pheroden|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crisnoble|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|10 years ago|reply