Apples and tomatoes are not good examples for your point. There's a tremendous variety of apples available in standard grocery stores, most of which are significantly tastier than the red delicious. And bland tomatoes are a result of having to ship tomatoes, which is near impossible with ripe fruit, hence selecting robust varieties, picking early, and having them ripen in transit. There too, increasingly you can find heirloom varieties in stores, however they are understandably more expensive. Try canned tomatoes if you don't need a pretty fruit but are looking for flavor -- canning varieties are picked ripe and immediately processed.
Canned varieties use tomatoes grown specially for canning and they are picked unripe ..ripened with ethylene gas and immediately processed.
With apples, old canopied orchards are destroyed and cannot be replanted again due to replant disease. United States is facing a huge problem with fire blight disease (that affects all pommes..pears and pecans too) and there is a new fire blight resistant foot stock..but dwarfing stocks and grafting takes time.
On a side note, I tried pitching a rootstock grafting robot but never found traction. Agtech only funds tech that uses chemicals and fertilizers. We are losing tasty cultivars and will end up only growing the monocropped varieties at scale. It’s literally the same economics as factory production. But nature is not a factory. I don’t have the energy or inclination to effect any change anymore. I see the ground reality now and profit motives. I know I will eat well because I save seeds and grow old cultivars for taste and not quantity. I don’t think it’s my job to change the world anymore. Covid brought home a lot of realities. All the weak spots were exposed. I am looking at everything with a diff set of eyes than I did two years ago.
Currently pears are going through a dimming phase due to thin profit margins. In the next few generations, pears will be a rare fruit. Meanwhile in this environment, Abundant robotics..the only American robotic apple harvester (and one that had done better than any of the other start ups and was also the first) was shut down and it’s assets auctioned off. I know exactly what went down and why it was shut down but it’s not something for public consumption. An American grown and funded fantastic tech had its patents and data ‘sold’. It was developed at SRI Menlo Park and entire annual budgets of Washington state university research Dept. And the company sold even shit like its compressors and furniture at an auction. Fully stripped and when it’s on the auction block, it becomes a undesirable acquisition. It was staggeringly shocking. That’s when I realized that this is all futile. Bigger forces planning bigger goals.
I honestly believe that American ag is on its way down. We are fast going towards food insufficiency and higher reliance on imported food. I don’t know if it’s deliberate policy or if there are other motivations at work. But this is ‘above my paycheck’, as it were and I think we are looking at the eventual demise of American food ag.
Having said that, I am 1000% sure that relying outside our borders for our food and not being food self sufficient is a terrible recipe for disaster. I expect high inflation of food prices and food shortages in the near future in America. Even more severe than in other parts of the world because we are already reliant on imports and most of the food we grow comes from the desert called California that is looking at decades of drought in the future. And its main growing areas in Central Valley and central coast is going to experience salt water intrusion and subsidence is already happening. I give it thirty years before all that land is sold to property development or open space because food won’t grow there anymore. Meanwhile we have done nothing to ensure food security. I will be dead by then and until then I am going to eat well. Nothing lasts forever.
