Ed Yong explains http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supermarket-tomatoes-look-great-but-taste-bland/
"Ann Powell from the University of California, Davis has found that farmers have inadvertently ruined the taste of tomatoes by selecting for ones that ripen together and look good. That aesthetic appeal has been driven by a single change in a single gene, which also affects how the fruits taste."
Even for the standard varieties, the homegrown ones taste better, may be because as a commenter explains "Tomatoes are also harvested before ripening fully, if at all, to give them better shipping qualities and then exposed to ethylene to bring them to a ripened state. Unfortunately, green tomatoes lack the sugars and, presumably, the nutritional value of vine-ripened varieties."
My experience is that our garden tomaoes taste better than market ones if one can get them before birds do. I started covering them with nets but that does not stop possums which eat even green tomatoes. There is also a discussion in http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supermarket-tomatoes-look-great-but-taste-bland/.
"Ann Powell from the University of California, Davis has found that farmers have inadvertently ruined the taste of tomatoes by selecting for ones that ripen together and look good. That aesthetic appeal has been driven by a single change in a single gene, which also affects how the fruits taste."
Even for the standard varieties, the homegrown ones taste better, may be because as a commenter explains "Tomatoes are also harvested before ripening fully, if at all, to give them better shipping qualities and then exposed to ethylene to bring them to a ripened state. Unfortunately, green tomatoes lack the sugars and, presumably, the nutritional value of vine-ripened varieties."
My experience is that our garden tomaoes taste better than market ones if one can get them before birds do. I started covering them with nets but that does not stop possums which eat even green tomatoes. There is also a discussion in http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supermarket-tomatoes-look-great-but-taste-bland/.
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