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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2564 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

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So I came across a reddit thread that discusses something I've been feeling for the past decade or so.

  • Strawberries that are bright red outside, but white inside and have no flavor
  • Bananas that are green and rotten at the same time
  • Kiwis that are partially rock-hard and partially mush
  • Potatoes that wrinkle in a couple day
  • Chicken thighs that maintain a texture more like raw even when cooked to temp
  • Beef that smells foul and is somehow rubbery even when barely cooked

I doubt it's just my city, and I go to several different grocery chains (some better than others), but the frequency with which I encounter the above issues and many more just feels so much higher than 15 years ago. I've gone back and forth about how much of this is bias/nostalgia and how much of this is real, but the more that I eat abroad and the more that I go grocery shopping, the more convinced I get that there has indeed been a significant recent decline in produce quality in the US.

Where in the country are you, and where do you shop? I’m in New England and I don’t think I’ve had any of these problems even once (except the strawberries, I have bought bad strawberries before, I think it’s worth getting branded ones in many cases). I get groceries variously at Star Market, Trader Joe’s, Market Basket, and occasionally Costco. I’ve bought cheap meat that wasn’t exactly good, but never outright bad like you’re describing. Maybe go up one price level?

The potato thing in particular makes me think your solution is “go to a different store.” Bad potatoes at a supermarket is just ridiculous. Never seen that anywhere.

I can't really help with the meat, but I was a produce manager in a previous life. I'll address the object level points first.

-the strawberries are supposed to be like this. It's intentional. The entire relationship of the strawberries to their producer, transporter, and retailer is as something you will give them money for. Once you've bought it their relationship to that item is over. As long as no other retailer defects from this scheme this is how it will remain. They are selected for shelf life and appearance to drive sales. No one cares if they're consumed. This is the ultimate fate of a great deal of products in capitalism if people don't actively work against it with a priority other than raw exploitation and profit. (im a capitalist myself, i just acknowledge its failure modes exist) Strawberries are easy to grow btw.

-bananas were never meant to leave the tropics. they actually have -terrible- shelf lives if picked anywhere even close to ripe. Bannanas are shipped rock hard and dark green. When kept in a 0 oxygen cooler they'll stay this way for 2-3 months. The retailer or distributer can then plan for how many they need to 'be ripe' at what times to meet demand but not over-shoot. You then gas the absolute shit out of them with ethylene. You can still sometimes see the condensed ethylene on the outside of the peel when they're trying to ripen them fast. Its a natural outgas of the plant to time the ripening of all its fruits together in the wild. The commercial operations are safe to eat; this actually happens to most tropical fruit. Without ethylene gas chambers most of us who've lived in the temperate climes would likely have never had a bananna in our lives. With it they are 49¢/lb at Kroger. The reason they are green and rotten is a combination of being in storage for too long then gassed too hard so they'll look sellable (remeber our first entry on the list) long enough to move. The people who profit off the bananna probably don't mind these rotting in your home. Bannanas are cheap after all: just buy more. You'd likely need to move to Puerto Rico at the closest to grow your own bannanas, and I'm told even with a good climate they're a pain.

-Kiwis that are partially rock-hard and partially mush - the bannana process above is used on kiwis. the defects are the results of the same process descibed above. Again, that piece of fruit was a success as it was purchased.

-Potatoes that wrinkle in a couple day(s). Different beast with this one. These were likely already on the way out when purchased. A good potato will last months in the dry and dark. Pull off the bottom in the store. Break a few of them open. Turn the bags over if they're in bags. Light damage appears as a green stain just under the peel. The stores will flip them over to hide it. Look for dates, the larger bags are the only ones that usually have them, like the big case pack sacks the individual 5lb bags come in. Yellow potatos are harder to pass off as good in the store, the light damage is more obvious. Many stores will also create a disorienting lighting situation near the potatos so they are hard to judge. We did.

In general, most but not all produce items can be learned about and judged more or less accurately in the store. There are some that are hard though, like a watermelon. You can tell when one is obviously bad, but a nice juicy sweet one and one that is solid white on the inside can be identical on the outside. A good store will always cut a few open for sale. If they haven't done this, but usually do, its for a reason. Berries should not be too big or too dark in color, signs of too much or too little water. Apples should have a tight skin around the stem. Stone fruit (peaches, plums etc) and tomatos are harmed by refidgeration, go as fresh as possible on these at all times. I'll tear a peach in half in the store to test them. Any air gap between the stone and the inside of the fruit is a rejection of the whole lot, thats refridgeration damage.

You will probably never get a good tomato at a grocery store. Its not impossible, but there are very few incentives for a store to go through the trouble, and all the incentives to sell beautiful but entirely tasteless tomatos. The ones with a bit of the stem attached are sometimes better. In general anything with the stem still attached it either a flex or a mistake. It super easy to judge the freshness when you can examine a good length of the stem for moisture and dessication. A wet, green center of the stem is in indication that its been off the plant a single digit number of days and almost never seen in a conventional store. Farmers markets and home gardens are the place to get tomatos. Also the Amish if you live near them can hook you up with a lot of this stuff.

Organic is often a scam. It wasn't always this way. You have to research heavily in this space to avoid paying more for shriveled crap.

I can probably give specific guidance for various produce items, though I've been out of the business for 20 years now.

Minor correction- you can grow bananas on the gulf coast, with a lot of effort around winter hardening, and they may not produce in a bad year. I've eaten home grown bananas from someone's backyard in Accadiana, and in Houston.

You will probably never get a good tomato at a grocery store.

My grandparents were gardeners for 60+ years for this reason. My father is pushing 50 years of gardening for the same reason. Store-bought tomatoes are only useful for looks and are otherwise awful. Home-grown ones are a totally different vegetable (or fruit, whatever). The same applies to strawberries and a bunch of other produce.

The strawberry thing is varieties of strawberries that look big, red, and beautiful on store shelves but have almost no flavour. Also they ship well.

They are dominant with California growers, not sure about other states.

It's one of the things I tease California about. People from there just assume strawberries have no flavour. Steve Sailer is a Californian and usually has interesting observations, but once he talked about how strawberries are a flavourless decorative fruit.

California popularized adding strawberries to salads, because they think they are basically a vegetable.

Beef and Chicken have been having domestic production problems in the US. There were very aggressive chicken culling during the Biden admin against bird flu. Beef producers took big hits during covid. Supply chain disruptions kept feed prices high. I suspect that some of the corporate consolidation and regulatory changes haven't helped. The US beef herd has been declining for years and it's currently the smallest since the 1970s, in the face of a much larger population. Obviously imports have offset a lot of that.

I'm conspiracy minded and paranoid, so I think there's an alliance of Big Ag and vegans in the USDA working to wipe out small producers and make meat more expensive. But no, I can't prove that.

Anyways I think that in the face of higher prices stores have been putting lower quality meat on the shelves.

Potato prices for farmers are way down, so I'm not sure why quality would be dropping there.

It could also be something happening during transport. Truck drivers setting the trailer temp to be too high or too low for some reason. Perhaps letting it get too warm then dropping it near freezing right before delivery so it's cold enough when it's unloaded.

It's one of the things I tease California about. People from there just assume strawberries have no flavour. Steve Sailer is a Californian and usually has interesting observations, but once he talked about how strawberries are a flavourless decorative fruit.

California popularized adding strawberries to salads, because they think they are basically a vegetable.

This is absurd and hilarious. Can any CA posters confirm if this is real? If true, just another reason not to move to Cali, I guess.

Apples are much better than they were fifteen years ago, mostly because I know what varieties to buy now. My guess is that apples have 'improved' because people buy them by cultivar while strawberries have gotten worse because they are sold simply as strawberries. Sugar dense cultivars are naturally more expensive by weight or volume than water dense cultivars, and consumers probably just buy the cheaper strawberry without a recognizable name like Honeycrisp to attach to the expensive package.

Driscoll's has been selling Sweetest Batch berries as a premium line that (presumably) uses more sugar dense cultivars. I do find Sweetest Batch to have a much higher hit rate of good berries.

Apples are just better now actually. People eat them and give them to their kids. They're very convenient for all parties involved. If stored correctly some varieties will keep for 18 months. You could be buying an apple today that was picked in the late fall of 2024 and its mostly fine. They'll get turned into something else if they get to old and arent Fancy any more. Several terrible varieties of apple have more of less vanished as Americans started to eat more apples in the 90s, red delicious at the top of the chopping block. Apples have trends too, which lets them charge more for some of them desipte idential costs when they're 'hot'. Good margins generally in a space not really known for them. Low spoilage. Great crop overall thoughout American history.

And you didn't mention the avocados?

I don't know if I should mention this, but Costco avocados are kino. Basically never deal with a bad avocado. Just don't get anything from South America. Mexico or USA only.

Strange you mention Costco as having good ones. They're dreadful around me. Utterly taste-free and barely any texture, whereas ones I get from the grocery store are delicious enough to eat like an apple.

The avocados I get at Costco are better now than they were a couple of years ago. At that time they were prone to being rancid inside before they were even soft enough to eat.

I gave up on finding consistently acceptable avocados so long ago that I forgot about them. If I'm going to buy bad produce, I might as well get cheap bad produce. Avocado dishes must be so expensive at restaurants because they're having to throw out more than half of them. Regardless, they're certainly an appropriate addition to the list.

The chicken thing might be them absorbing water during the chilling process. Look for packaging that says "air-chilled" and see if that solves your texture problem.

The banana thing is a combination of being picked too early and stored too cold.

Once bananas get too cold the ripening process stops and they will rot not ripen.

protip: the smaller bananas are almost always the most flavorful ones. Maybe the same is true of strawberries, I dunno, but I have found the banana tip to be pretty consistent.

This is true of almost all true berries, to an extent. There is an ideal size for everything, bigger is usually not better.

(bannanas are berries. as are tomatos and peppers and grapes. True Berries, botanically speaking.)

Strawberries, not necessarily by size, but redder, darker seeds usually indicate a sweeter and more flavorful berry. Blueberries though, smaller wild varietals are more flavorful.

Smaller varietals or in the same bunch?

I haven't noticed those particular things, though I may be the wrong person to ask because I never had a very strong sense of taste.

I have however noticed that the types of beef available at most, but not all, of my local grocery stores seems to have changed. Most of the selection used to be in those styrofoam tray things covered with shrink-wrap, and it consisted of ground beef in various semi-random weights and various cuts of steak also in various semi-random weights. Items that seemed as if somebody in a butcher shop somewhere was lopping of cuts of meat and scoops of ground beef onto these trays in a semi-sloppy way, wrapping them, then weighing and labeling them. Now, those items seem to be gone from a number of stores, replaced with similar items in a fancier-looking package and a more mass-produced style. The ground beef is now only in quantities of exactly 1lb, and too bad if you want any fractional quantities. The steaks also seem to have a more uniform style and cost at least double the price too. The other meats I've looked at seem to have some similar changes, but without as much mass-produced uniformity. I do not like this change, and have been doing my purchases of such things from other stores that seem to have better selections.

Beef that's packaged too long greys it's harmless but undesirable to customers. So stores used to have meat cutters who cut and wrapped chunks of beef into packes for sale. Sealed Air figured out a way to fill a sealed container with a mixture of gases that prevents the color change and seal those gasses in the package. That means meat cutting moved to a slaughter house and packaged meat stays in the package much longer.

It's real, and It's climate change and capitalism.

All the economically viable cultivares of those fruits have pretty specific temperature requirements in that you need to know with certainty how wet/hot it will be when they are harvested and at various points during their growth. If it's off by a certain margin, you either get a crop failure or a curing failure, which is how you end up with potatoes that go bad from a single nick from the spade instead of healing, and onions that only partially cure and then sprout or rot. (Remember that vegetables are living plant parts,)

There is no amount of money that can fix the snake river plateau being warmer than it ever has been the day after the onions come up, so for the rest of your life you will have hit or miss produce.

Re. Bananas: If you get them at Costco (in california at least) you will be safer; the ones at my store come from Costa Rica and will reliably all go bad at the same inconvenient moment.

I'm less familiar with meat but I know that the major producers have trimmed so much fat from the process that they have reached the bone and are starting to scrape; I have no direct personal connection to that particular industry so I only have hearsay, but I'm told that the production end is getting squeezed hard to find some efficiencies after 200 years of finding efficiencies, so they are having to do some shit they know is bad to get the numbers Tyson et al require. This will be doubly true if you live outside of Comifornia; where they specifically regulate out certain practices.

It's climate change and capitalism.

I'm not generally a white knight for capitalism but I really don't think it's appropriate to blame here.

If people insisted upon better products, capitalism would generate and deliver them. And it does! It's never been easier to find amazing produce year-round, if you're willing to go the extra mile and pay a bit more.

The problem is that the average consumer is stupid and tasteless, and economies of scale mean that mass-market products will reflect the situation.

That too, but I also blame that on capitalism. I grew up in a particularly rural part of a country that hadn't really felt the hand of the market pinch it's ass yet; no running water no electricity one phone you rode a horse three hours to reach and then gave your message to the guy who ran it; type of place.

The way standards DROPED when the market finally arrived was crazy; but in exchange you get to have a big piece of red meat a couple times a month in your own house instead of a couple times a quarter when someone killed an animal.

It's a trade off you only know you are making if you've lived both ways, and I'm part of the last generation from one of the last places on earth that will even have the opportunity to feel it, outside of weird cults and rejectionist tribes.

Why is your problem capitalism in particular and not technology or market forces?

As usual when people complain about capitalism I get the sense that you're just unsatisfied with the basic structure of reality.

ETA I do appreciate your perspective and can relate to some degree.

Because it really is the ideological element of capitalism, the religious faith that price signals and consumption capture all useful information and that whoever has the biggest number is divinely ordained by god (the Market) where the difference sets in.

We had markets for thousands of years before capitalism, we had technological advances for thousands of years before capitalism, and capitalism IMO actually has a very poor track record in spurring the development of novel technological frameworks compared to autism.

That's not to say that the system in question doesn't deliver the results, because it clearly does. I just think that the people that were born capitalists in a capitalist world, read capitalist books, went to capitalist church and live capitalist lives are almost incapable of imagining that the world was once different, and at some point in the future will be different again.

It's like you said, they imagine that the ability to freely accrue capital, and turn wealth into capital, and turn capital into wealth, are "the basic structure of reality", when that has only been true globally for about 70 years.

I've definitely seen a decline in chicken quality over the last five years. I'm not exactly sure what the cause is, but it's real. Woody breast, in particular, is almost a guarantee unless you get chicken from a farmer's market.

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