Maybe the Netherlands are different, but I find it's usually not that specific countries make trash fruits and veggies, but export-bound fruits and vegetables have transport concerns that require them to be picked before they reach their peak. Here, american blueberries and strawberries are big, bland and watery, local ones are juicy, sweet, tart and delicious. Or corn, theirs is bland, ours is sweet. But I'm not convinced that americans that live near those farms have the same experience at all.

When I grow my tomatoes, they are usually picked at their peak ripeness, they were being pumped full of sugar and nutrients by the plant until the last second when I picked them and cooked with them. The ones that have to travel are picked before ripe, and "ripen" sad and alone in a truck with no extra nutrients, and when they reach me looking "ripe", it's usually a facade. Local market fruits and vegetables stand somewhere in between, depending on volume and channel it's being sold in.

There is a difference though between fruits and vegetables imported for year round availability, and those imported as a seasonal bounty; the later ones maintain quality as it sells relatively quickly in season and doesn't need to be picked as much in advance.

> corn, theirs is bland, ours is sweet.

Maize starts converting sugars into starches the moment it's harvested. That's why fresh-picked is so important: even within a few hours, the flavor changes.

That's also why frozen or canned corn is a good idea: picked at the peak of ripeness and almost immediately has its enzymes deactivated either by freezing or boiling. Aside from texture issues (which won't matter for many applications like soups and smoothies), frozen vegetables and berries have better taste than "fresh" from the produce department for most products, most of the year. Also why so many cooks swear by canned tomatoes for sauces: they're better quality tomatoes picked at peak ripeness, but the only way they can travel is frozen or canned. And nobody freezes tomatoes; it screws up the texture so badly that canning is no worse and possibly better, plus it's expensive to deal with cold chain (whereas a pallet of San Marzano tomatoes can sit on a shelf until it rusts through with little loss of flavor and no maintenance other than the shelf it sits on).

Yeah, eating local and in season fruits and vegetables should give you all the benefits. Eating imported/out of season fruits and vegetables will come but with worse taste and probably more expensive.

To be fair Looye honey tomatoes are tasty (and expensive), although I find them a bit on the "artificial tasty" side. Tasty Toms are quite ok. Snack tomatoes (snoeptomaatjes) are a hit and miss.

While I admire these successes, the hard truth is that 90% of the Dutch tomato produce is landfill material. Overall tomato cultivation in the Netherlands feels like a vanity project to prove the farming prowess of the country.

There was an item about this on the news where they interviewed a grower about this (it was strawberries in that item, but it's basically the same idea) and the grower was sad about it as well, because he hated the supermarkets for forcing them to sell inferior product.

The problem is not that they can't make delicious food, it's that no one is willing to pay for it. Strawberries are already expensive, and perfectly ripe strawberries would be even more expensive.

You have the slightly tastier "Tasty Tom" tomatoes that are 30% more expensive that are already a tough sell.

The harsh truth is that people keep buying the trash tomatoes, so the growers grow them.

There's also a weird spiral going on where life has become more expensive, which made things like farming good tasting tomatoes on a Croatian island infeasible, which in turn made good tasting tomatoes too expensive to buy for people living on a Croatian island.