Fruit and vegetables are best when eaten immediately after picking
them (or digging them) when fully mature. Anything that softens when
it is fully ripe (peaches, oranges, tomatoes, etc) MUST either be
picked when still rock hard and ripened off the plant or bred to be
rock hard even when nearly ripe in order for it to survive a few days
or a week being shaken and banged around in shipping.
Doesn't matter where you are, local fully ripe fruit will be so much
better than shipped in fruit you would hardly believe they are the
same thing. The further away the fruit started out, the bigger the
difference.
And some things simply do not ship and are unavailable except dead
ripe on the plant, raspberries and black berries being the most
obvious examples.
I encourage everyone to grow their own herbs and things like tomatoes,
even if you have to grow them in a pot on a balcony, they will be
better than anything other than very fresh farm market versions.
Varieties do make a difference, though. Delicious apples are anything
but, being the mealiest flat, dullest flavored, bitterest skinned
apples in existence. Their popularity is due entirely and completely
to their blooming and ripening habits -- bloom takes place over about
three days, the entire planting, and hence every apple on the tree is
ripe at the same time and the orchard can be stripped in a single
operation. When sprayed with Alar to make them even pointer on the
bottom (apples don't have points, by the way, unless sprayed with
growth regulators), they are about as close to inedible as an apple
can get.
Sadly, Washington State growers seem to think all apples should have
extreme points on the bottom, and irrigate on top of the Alar spray,
so they are uniformly very much second rate. I greatly prefer New
Zealand or Australian apples, so it's not the distance, it's the
growing in that case. Local apples are much better, but most of the
orchards have vanished over the last 50 years.
Peter
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