I wish we had less selection, in general. My family lives in Spain, and I've also lived in France. This is just my observation, but American grocery stores clearly emphasize always having a consistent variety, whereas my Spanish family expects to eat higher quality produce seasonally. I suspect that this is a symptom of a wider problem, not the cause, but American groceries are just fucking awful by comparison, and so much more expensive too.
What I would give for an actual fresh greengrocer 😔
Move to straya, plenty of jobs atm, free healthcare, not a lot of homes and no where near the consumer brand choice. But it also means rich are not as rich, and no guns (by comparison) so kids are safe in schools!
Most supermarkets have plenty of fresh food, its better and cheaper to buy from farmers markets, but you can get by with the super chains( not going to get into the profiteering from them, save that for another day).
Fresh food is weirdly expensive in the US. Got to give the US props for being consistently expensive when it comes to health related expenses I guess.
It seems bizarre for such a rich country to have the priorities so backwards.
health and well being? Nah.
I feel like this thread is going really be “available in your part of the US.”
Grocery stores and populations are pretty varied across the US. What you can easily get in a San Francisco, Manhattan, or Boise grocery store can differ quite a bit.
Sure but there's also tons of produce that has a low shelf life or doesn't travel well (e.g. bruises easily) so you don't find it anywhere except right where it's grown.
e.g. I live where Pawpaws grow. I've never even found a whole one because they perish so fast.
Bananas other than the Cavendish and a greater variety of potatoes. There are supposed to be so many varieties of each out there, but we only get one banana and 3 or 4 potatoes.
The cherimoya is also pretty good from what I remember, so I would like to have that again for >$5.
The variety of bananas in Vietnam was great. I was going to put that here since they are impossible to import quickly enough.
Big fan of cherimoya ✋ Looked into ordering some online once, the price is insane
I had a cherimoya in Spain and I LOVED it. Impossible to find here in NA though :(
I got mine from a higher end grocery store (Wegmans) so something like that is your best bet. Keep searching!
Ooo, the Ugli Fruit aka Jamaican Tangelo was good too that I found there!
I have a hard time finding black currant
Isn't blackcurrant illegal in the US? I remember hearing that somewhere anyway.
Such a shame, cassis (blackcurrant soda) makes for such a tasty drink.You can order blackcurrant drinks online, as well as getting extract.
googles
It sounds like the problem was that they could host a fungus that affected other plants, but it's been allowed on a state-by-state basis for some decades after they found a resistant variant.
https://www.grunge.com/879107/heres-why-blackcurrant-was-banned-in-the-us-for-over-50-years/
By the end of the 19th century, farmers noticed that blackcurrants had introduced an invasive species called blister fungus that killed white pine trees, per Business Insider. The fungus solely spreads through blackcurrants rather than from pine tree to pine tree. That means the U.S. was faced with a choice at the time: blackcurrants or the white pine. With national forests highly valued for the timber industry sales used to develop the U.S. as we know it, they chose to protect the white pine.
In the early 20th century, the U.S. government made it illegal to farm blackcurrants and put forth resources to eradicate all Ribes plants from the environment, according to Business Insider. Interestingly, European agriculture met this fungus long ago when it was introduced in blackcurrant plants, but they didn't rely on white pine as fiercely as the U.S., and the "white pine was sacrificed to retain the Ribes," according to "History of White Pine Blister Rust Control: A Personal Account."
Blackcurrants come back
After more than half a century, scientists discovered a new variant of blackcurrant that was resistant to the fungal disease that threatened the white pine. Without the threat to the timber industry, the U.S. government "left it up to the states to lift the ban" blackcurrants in 1966 (via Cornell University). It wasn't until 2003 when New York, where blackcurrants were most heavily produced in the late 19th century, became the first state to uplift the blackcurrant ban in the continental U.S. Since then, some other states like Connecticut and Vermont have also rescinded their bans. But neighboring Massachusetts and Maine (or "The Pine Tree" state) are some of the many other states in which such bans remain (per AHS Gardening, Mass.gov).
They are now legal to grow in many states. Unfortunately still not going to find it in a grocery store most likely. I grow my own in the backyard so I can have some at least part of the year. They're perennial, very easy to grow, and produce a ton of berries. Gooseberries were banned for similar reasons, but are now also legal in many states.
Yes! As a Scandinavian living in the US: I would love to see black currant, red currant, and gooseberries in my grocery store.
You can't import yuzu fruits or plants. All the yuzu in the US is descended from the 100 original plants imported before it was made illegal.
But really, I want soft cheeses...
We can get yuzu fruit here (Florida) but couldn't get the seeds to sprout, not sure how the trees are propagated. Anyway - the fruit is underwhelming, the zest is divine, I made a yuzu kosho, it is delicious.
Almost all fruit trees are clones. You'd need a cutting.
Google says they taste like a mix of lemon, orange and grapefruit. Is that accurate?
More like lemon-lime-pomelo, but WDIY.
Sort of Meyer lemon with lime zest? The ones I got were not juicy at all, and what juice they had, I would prefer lime. But the zest of the yuzu is amazing, I do like it. You can buy yuzu sake, or a yuzu soda, to taste the flavor. Yuzu kosho is very different, savory and spicy, i made mine with grated fresh jalapenos and fermented it, absolutely divine.
I've had it here in Europe.
Personally, I think it tastes like a lemon that went bad. Like, kind of an uncanny valley thing. It's close enough for me to think it's one thing but far enough away from me to know it is definitely not what I want.
I've heard rumors that, while we see two kinds of mango in the US, there are many more varietals in India, and they're all better. I'd like to have access to some of those; mangoes rock.
I suspect this is like our tomatoes. The tomatos you buy in stores were cultivated to be pretty, to get harvested by a machine, and to ship without getting damaged. Meanwhile, heirloom tomatoes will split their skin on a humid day, but they pack a ton more flavor in. The same is true for the vast majority of our fruit and veg. Actually ripened on plant produce doesn't have a very long shelf life.
That's the truth, not a rumor.
Oh there are like many varieties of mangoes z but hands down best is called hapoos or alphonso, it's so so good. I recently found it EU due a colleague and tasted other varieties too such as kesar ( in think it means orange) , in could eat the peel also . The only place that you might get is Indian grocery stores in the areas specially now to end of julyi guess
All those different kinds of banana. All we get is cabendish which is, like, the worst of all the amazing banana varieties.
Jackfruit
I remember getting one when one of the supermarkets around here carried them and theyre huge fruits. Probably 20 pounds of fruit that we ate from it and by the time we were done I never wanted to see another one again lol. I wouldn't mind trying them again now but probably maybe just a pound not a whole fruit.
A restaurant out here had a great jackfruit sloppy Joe for vegetarians but I think they discontinued serving it.
I've seen the big chain grocery stores carrying that around here. I have no idea how to eat it or anything though.
Strawberries that taste like they did 10+ years ago?
When I was a kid in the 80's there was a place my Grandmother used to take us to that had hay rides to take you out into their strawberry fields where you'd pick your own berries and pay like 50¢ per pound.
Good memories.
Strawberries are so easy to grow that they are almost invasive.
If you leave them alone, they will overtake whatever is near them.
Each strawberry plant I have sends off multiple runners, with multiple nodes per runner.
It is a very high exponential growth rate.
You can start with 4 and have over 100 in 2 years.
If you can't grow your own or go to farmers market. Get them when it's early in the season (I.e. now) as a big reason they usually taste like shit is because they are harvested unripe and then ripen in transit, which causes them to be light in colour, watery and have that white centre to them.
But early in the season they are /more likely/ to be allowed to ripen on the plant.
I've been eating loads of strawberries this past week from my local big chain supermarket and they have mostly been amazing (and cheap too)
Wild strawberries are amazing. Sad they're so hard to get a substantial amount of.
I rarely see leeks, and when I do, they’re extremely expensive. Such a versatile vegetable that I wish more Americans knew about!
They grow naturally where I live. Not the giant ones like Farfetch'd carries, but when I was a kid, I loved digging them up in the woods and just eating them raw lol
I think that's a local thing. My grocer carries them, and they're always in stock. I line in the Midwest. But I seem to remember eating them a lot in Oregon, too?
Apricots. They're available, but they're always shitty.
I'd kill for apricots like you can get in the EU. Cheaper than here and they were delicious, not mealy and bland.
Agree. Good apricots are elusive. I have had them but 99% of the time they go straight from underripe to mealy.
Cumquats. We can get them here, but I rarely see them. What could be better than a little orange you can eat like a grape?
I think you meant kumquats, your version may be creamier though. ;P
Fruits from the genus Garcinia (mangosteen, achacha, and related). They're supposedly some of the best tasting fruit ever, but very hard to find in the US aside from specialty growers in Cali or Miami.
Freshly cut hearts of palm.
We have the canned ones which arent bad but now im curious what the fresh cut ones are like
Add fresh bamboo shoots too. Wonderful delicate flavor. Oh, and banana flowers.
the Gros Michel banana. I never had the chance to try one before they were wiped out.
edit: and the Hua Moa banana, because it looks silly
I'll tack on apple bananas. They're tiny and taste like an apple and a banana had babies.
Apple bananas are freaking amazing. I'm always so happy when we score some at the Asian grocery. That little pop of acidity makes all the difference.
The Gros Michel isn't fully extinct, you can still buy them as delicacies. But from what I've heard they aren't that great, just different to the Cavendish
Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.
So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we've both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we've crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we've made food worse. Because we're not using local plants for our food, you see, we're just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald's.
The thread's gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there's not like, it's not just the huckleberry, you understand, there's a lot more out there that you don't know about, both edible and not.
Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores,
Visit the Nordics in June-July.
Markets full of them.
Hell, you don't need to buy any, just walk into any forest and start picking.
First, note that there are a number of plants called the "huckleberry".
My guess is that @[email protected] has good odds of talking about Vaccinium membranaceum. I've had that in Idaho, and consider it to be pretty good.
People pick it in the wild, but it hasn't been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they're a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.
I don't believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name "huckleberry" only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native "hurtleberry". You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don't see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.
We also have a plant called "huckleberry" around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.
My favorite type of apple is Jazz. It's less-sweet than the Honeycrisp, which tends to be more-widely-available.
I've seen Jazz apples in stores around Southeastern Pennsylvania. They're pretty good, but my favorite is Pazazz apples. They're similar in size to Honeycrisp but sweeter with a bit of tartness to them.
Durians
Best I can do is fart on a cantaloupe. Take it or leave it.
They’re readily available in the LA area. You just need to visit an asian specialty market.
Guavas
I’ve got a tree in my yard that pumps out hundreds a few times a year. I have to give them away. SoCal
Give me 🥺
I just got into guava recently. I live in Jersey and my local ShopRite started stocking clamshells with six guavas or so, ranging in size from a goofball to something larger than a goofball but smaller than a baseball. Maybe like billiards ball sized. I'd never eaten them before like a month ago, and so the seeds threw me T first, but I've got the technique down now and shit, when they're ripened, nice and soft, they are fantastic. I worry about the day when I get to ShopRite and the guavas are no longer.
We have guava in the stores here in Florida but I've seen rhubarb twice in half a century.
Holy cow, I hate rhubarb. We always had it in the garden and my grandma used to bake cakes with it. Thos sweet cakes would be sooo good, but that pos plant always ruined them to non-edible garbage. At least for me, some people like that taste, though. (Europe)
Fresh bamboo shoots.
I always wanted to try the cashew fruit ever since I discovered it was a fruit.
Allegedly it's too juicy and fragile to import.
My dad used to pick some up when he took our dog for a walk, and the way I would realize he had done so was by my suddenly feeling queasy due to the smell.
I hope you get the chance to try it sometime, but if you don't know that it might also not be a bad thing :)
I'm Canadian but for some reason you never see tangerines anymore. Plenty of other citrus but not tangerines
I also would like to see pink and red fleshed apples in the store. And pawpaws. I sometimes get some from my local farmer friend and they are SO good but hard to come by.
Huckleberry but apparently they are really difficult to farm.
I’ll be your huckleberry
Persimmons. I know they're available at least in the bay area because I had them when I lived there briefly, but have never found them in my regular home in the pacific northwest. I also don't remember them as a kid growing up in Tennessee.
Note that there are two different cultivars I've seen sold in the Bay Area.
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Fuyu. These are typically eaten crunchy (and are so even when ripe), like an apple. They look kind of like a tomato, are short and wide.
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Hachiya. There are very soft, almost a jell-o consistency, when ripe, and are very fragile. My dad used to grow them in his backyard.
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We have persimmons in Michigan
Those are very late season fruit. I wasn't aware they weren't available up north. Look for them starting in October, I think.
Thin-walled bell peppers like you find in Japan and China. Even the local Asian grocery stores don't sell them, and I can find pretty much anything else.
Like the Shephard peppers?
No, very different. These are like miniature bell peppers with thin walls. Shepherd peppers are not so small and have thick walls.
Takii's New Ace is a variety I've grown.
Any of them before soil depletion and banana blight. Fruits and veggies tasted so much better in the 80s. Melons in particular taste lifeless now. Once in a while I strike gold at the local farmer's market or in our own garden.
And tomatoes. Tomatoes used to be amazing. Even the worst ones were amazing.
Now they just taste like “wet”. If you want a good tomato you have to track down lovingly and carefully bred heirloom plants and grow them yourself.
Nah. Even a Burpee is good.
The main thing that ruins store tomatoes is that they pick them green and breed them for travel.
Pretty much any tomato plant that you buy will be bred for taste and resistance.
That said, heirlooms do have all kinds of crazy flavors and differences.
I bought a rainbow tomato seed pack, it had like 7-10 different varieties, I don’t actually remember.
The white tomatoes were a trip, with your eyes open they taste tart, but with your eyes closed they just taste like a really good tomato.
OMG, yes. The flavor "wet" has been added to my lexicon.
Melons taste just as good to me now as the 80s or 90s.
I’m visiting Bangkok currently, so: definitely custard apples and mangosteens. Snake fruits and guava and the specific type of tangerines they use as “oranges” over here, too. And the green skinned “sweet oranges” which are also awesome. And like all the various types of mangos you can get in Thailand.
Also, I’m taking “available” to mean “purchasable, and ripened mostly on the vine”, because the stuff that gets shipped internationally is picked SUPER unripe just so it doesn’t spoil before sale.
Basically, I would fucking LOVE it if there was a Thai grocery in my city that flagrantly violated the Washington Treaty.
For real though, if you ever get the chance to try a ripe custard apple, they’re absolutely fucking delicious. Can’t recommend it enough.
I'd love it if Stephen Hawking and Freddy Mercury were alive again
rimshot
Pineapple guavas. I can get them where I am sporadically, but they don't ship incredibly well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feijoa_sellowiana
Feijoa sellowiana[2][3] also known as Acca sellowiana (O.Berg) Burret,[4] is a species of flowering plant in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. It is native to the highlands of southern Brazil, eastern Paraguay, Uruguay, and northern Argentina.[5] Feijoa are also common in gardens of New Zealand.[6] It is widely cultivated as an ornamental tree and for its fruit. Common names include feijoa (/feɪˈʒoʊ.ə/,[7] /-ˈhoʊ.ə/,[8] or /ˈfiːdʒoʊ.ə/[9]), pineapple guava and guavasteen, although it is not a true guava.[10] It is an evergreen shrub or small tree, 1–7 metres (3.3–23.0 ft) in height.[11]
Ripe fruit is prone to bruising; difficulty maintaining the fruit in good condition for any length of time, along with the short period of optimum ripeness and full flavor, probably explains why feijoas are not exported frequently, and are typically sold close to where they are grown. However, intercontinental shipping of feijoa by sea or air has been successful.[10]
Because of the relatively short shelf life, storekeepers need to be careful to replace older fruit regularly to ensure high quality. In some countries, they also may be purchased at roadside stalls, often at a lower price.
Feijoas may be cool-stored for approximately a month and still have a few days of shelf life at optimum eating maturity.[10] They also may be frozen for up to one year without a loss in quality.
Yeah... there are a lot of south american fruits that dont survive being transported here. eg. cashew fruit. Ive had the juice but not the fruit itself.
Green curry should have Thai eggplant yet I can only get it with that from one Thai restaurant I know
I’ve found Thai eggplant at 99 Ranch stores.
Nashi, or Japanese pears. Had some in Japan last year, and they were fantastic. Texture more like a soft apple, taste was great.
Google tells me asian pears are basically the same and if thats true, then they're one of the best fruits I have had.
Round, yellow, rough skin? Crisp like an apple, but sweet like a pear (less tangy than an apple)? If that's what you mean, 100% agree. They're fairly common, IME; we got them all the time in PA, and see them frequent-ish in the Midwest.
Fiddleheads
Depends where you live and if you know where to look. There are plenty near places I have lived. Usually near streams.
After having açai I wish it was easier to get those than blueberries. They're basically the same, but they actually have flavor without needing to be turned into a sauce or jam.
If you just want more intensity, maybe use an extract? I have some blueberry extract that I wanted to try adding to coffee. It's pretty potent.
Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/OliveNation-Pure-Blueberry-Extract-Ounce/dp/B004E7A33E/
Couple drops go a long way.
Beans.
What type? Most beans ship and preserve well when dried, so you can usually order them online.
Why is this downvoted? There are more kinds of beans than you can buy in the typical American supermarket. Tell me you've never been to an ethnic grocery store without telling me 😒
