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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3469 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

But so much stuff is straight up technique that can be duplicated elsewhere (yes the bread is important for most sandwiches but plenty of cities have good bread) - you should be able to make an excellent cheesesteak anywhere, they just don't.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

Every other tomato grown in the Mediterranean region. Same with olive oil. Italy is just better with marketing.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task. It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard. Maybe not the best tomatoes on the planet, but great ones that beat anything you buy in the grocery store so much there's not even any comparison. And tomato is one of those plants which once it starts producing, there's no stopping it. Which may be why the store ones are not as good - they are optimized for mass production, preservation and remote delivery - making a fruit that survives this journey is much different business than making a fruit that is going to be picked up and consumed within hours.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task.

What is unfortunately a huge task is growing tasty tomatoes, while - at the same time - making them fully machine-harvestable and giving them long shelf life while being tossed around in boxes and by customers in the produce section. Which is the actual reason large parts of Italy had access to excellent tomatoes - they still hand-picked a significant fraction of their tomatoes.

Notice the past-tense used above. Supermarket tomatoes in Italy today taste like anywhere else. From my informal data gathering, I'd guess they mostly faded out hand-picked heirloom varieties around 2010. Same is true for a lot of other "soft" produce, too. Peaches, plums, ect. now taste like everywhere else.

Farmers markets and restaurant suppliers still have the good stuff, though. The Italians additionally still grow a lot of heirloom varieties.

It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard.

Your backyard may vary. Rabbits and mice sneak under my fences easily, which I think explains why, although I can get tomato plants to grow like giant weeds, their fruits tend to vanish on me almost immediately after ripening, before I can pick them myself.

That happened to us with some things too. One year we lost almost all the cherries to fruit flies, another year squashes were all eaten... But somehow in our quarters, nobody is eating the tomatoes so far.

Salsa with ingredients straight from your garden you made yourself is life changing. Still prefer the high end canned stuff for my sauce though.

but, but muh volcanic soil!!!!

I remember hiking across the Agerola plateau (above the Amalfi coast) - we decided that the Path of the Gods wasn't hardcore enough and we were going to make it a full-day mountain hike from Positano back to Amalfi - and something was happening. I assume it was the volcanic soil and not the microclimate, given that everyone says it is the soil. Everything was huge - I particularly remember the sunflower/tomato fields. (The two crops are often planted together - a quick google suggests that the sunflowers attract pollinators for the benefit of the tomatoes) The tomatoes were bigger than the specialty tomatoes you used to be able to buy at farmers' markets in the south of France, and the sunflowers were far taller than I remember sunflowers elsewhere.

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