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Yizahi parent
The problem is that to a European citizen this is a bit unexpected. In Europe, in all countries, you can find roughly the same level of "safeness" of food across all tiers of stores. Go to a cheapest one and the most expensive one, and the yogurt, tomatoes or meat would be approximately the same quality and have the same nutritional components. The only difference would be that expensive store would additionally carry some imported fancy tomatoes or some fancy steak cuts. But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.
vel0city
Its not just a "tier" of store, its a "genre" of store. Stores like Dollar General are not really grocers, they just happen to carry some food products. They typically do not carry any fresh foods. So its not a matter of their tomatoes are somehow worse quality, its that they do not sell tomatoes. Its not that their meats are worse quality, they do not sell fresh meat. They practically only sell pre-packaged goods. Think about the few isles of junk food and small packages of household products (soaps and what not) you might find at a gas station, and scale that up ~800m^2.

If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.

When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.

selimthegrim
Certain Dollar Generals do carry fresh foods and there’s a sub brand called Dollar General Market that targets the grocery dollar.
rolisz
Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).
parineum
Tomatoes are, imo, the prime example and possibly the only one of popular produce, of bland produce in the US.

I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.

I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.

pirates
Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.
parineum
Tomatoes are different though. I barely knew what a tomato tasted like. I didn't like them because they were tasteless (when combined with sny other food) and slimy.

It isn't that homegrown tomatoes just taste better, they actually have taste.

tptacek
I mean, in most of the US, they're an extremely seasonal product. If you go to Pete's (a commodity big-box grocery chain in Chicago) in August, you'll get very good tomatoes. There's basically nowhere you're going to go to get very good fresh tomatoes (maybe cherry tomatoes) in April.
Yizahi OP
"Plastic" tomatoes has nothing to do with their nutritional score or inclusion of dangerous compounds. It's just a cheaper tomato variety with thicker skin and most likely harvested early, to be conditioned on the shelf. So these so called "plastic" tomatoes, or some fancy expensive ones have exact same level of harmful chemicals in EU - none at all. That was my point, that this safety level is accessible to poor and rich, regardless of their money.
supportengineer
Even in the SF Bay Area, we have this problem. The best tomatoes are from someone's backyard.
dgb23
They actually taste like tomatoes.

Unfortunate that they can be a bit difficult to grow. Very weather dependent.

dgb23
My wife doesn’t let me buy tomatoes in winter. And even summer tomatoes are bland in comparison to the ones one would get in a mediterran region or the ones she grows in our garden. It’s not even the same ballpark.
bahama_mama
The data does not support your thesis. US ranks 3rd in Quality and Safety of foods [1]. USDA Prime beef ribeye will have similar quality from variety of stores, USDA Choice will be similar across multiple stores as well.

US does not have a problem with food safety, it has a problem with widely available UPF with many other factors (price, time, distance to fresh produce etc).

[1] https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...

FirmwareBurner
>But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.

Speaking also as an European, not they would not. There's a pretty big difference in the quality of the meant across the board between shops and brands(suppliers) of meat depending how the animals were raised, fed and cared for.

Here in Austria there's been plenty of scandals covering the poor conditions of animals in meat factories (living in feces, infections with puss, etc) yet the meat cuts receive the AMA seal of approval. I also did some work for the farm tech sector and the conditions of animals in some (most) EU countries I saw were indeed as appalling as those in the stories. It almost made me go vegan.

Sure, it's all(probably) technically safe to eat due to all the antibiotics they pump in those animals, just like in the US, but quality varies a lot.

And like sibling said, there's also a big difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables you find in supermarkets depending on where they come from and the conditions under which they were farmed.

That's why I dislike these over generalist "In Europe it's like this and that" blanket statements. No it isn't, it's just one point on the graph, but in reality it varies A LOT, it's a friggin continent ffs.

Yizahi OP
You are correct, but the difference is that companies doing that in Europe are breaking the law if they treat cattle with banned compounds, while in USA farmers do this legally and at scale. This is why in this particular case I believe that generalizing is reasonable, because the fundamental approach differs so much.

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