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Comment by nielsbot | Hacker News Reader

Give me ugly, small, tasty berries any day instead of the opposite of that. Wonder if strawberries will join tomatoes and apples: return to variety, more focus on taste vs aesthetics.

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It's sad that tomatoes have gotten so bland that nowadays I instinctively correlate ugliness with good taste.

When I see an asymmetric tomato, in both size and color, I think, "Hey I bet that tastes good..".

EDIT: s/funny/sad/

Same with apples, at least around here. The correlation is usually "small, ugly, wrinkly → tasty and cheaper". Plus almost always produced nearer.

I frankly don't know why anyone buys the shiny ones more than once.

Most people just don't know that fruits and vegetable can actually taste good.

I learned that I liked cooked carrots at the age of 22. I spend 2 decades thinking they tasted horrible, because the only one I ate were the one I had in school.

For someone like me, there is no amount of apple flavor that outweighs the texture of a good apple. I don't eat many apples, but if apples were entirely tasteless (and that wasn't weird...), I wouldn't eat any fewer apples, because the best thing about biting into an apple is the "snap!" and the mouthfeel. One reason I don't buy and eat more apples now is that I have no reliable way to tell if a nice-looking apple will provide that, or whether it will be soft. Biting into an apple which is soft is not worth five good ones, so I mostly do not bother. :/

I pretty much only get these big ol Honeycrisp apples, they've never let me down and last possibly forever in the refrigerator (need to do more research) - http://www.honeybearbrands.com/products/

Maybe you're getting some bad Driscoll's. I've been impressed with the improvement in both looks and taste over the past few years. They also sometimes offer giant, beautiful strawberries which one would expect would sacrifice taste for looks - but they don't.

I agree that tomatoes are terrible.

Yes please. Tired of seeing these tasteless, excessively large watery strawberries that suck all the joy out of eating one.

Peaches are the worst casualty of this trend in Big Produce.

I have no doubt everyone who grew up with strawberries in the yard thinks the same. I don't expect a berry to get from lab to farm to grocer and be able to compete with something fresh picked that summer morning.

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