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.
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.
The original intent was to learn about fruits and veggies that most americans would be unaware of or dont have access to eg. brazilian grapes, ube, drumstick, adzuki beans etc. but good point.
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.
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.
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...
All those different kinds of banana. All we get is cabendish which is, like, the worst of all the amazing banana varieties.
It’s the red delicious of the banana world
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.
Strawberries that taste like they did 10+ years ago?
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.
I rarely see leeks, and when I do, they’re extremely expensive. Such a versatile vegetable that I wish more Americans knew about!
Where do you live where leeks are not common? Speaking for California here, they’re a common grocery store item.
Midwest here, I too can buy leeks any day of the week
Yeah, probably has more do to with proximity to at least a B tier grocery store. If your local grocer is Target, Walmart, or Family Dollar, then you’re only going to have access to the vegetables from Veggietales and bread from a plastic bag.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Huckleberry but apparently they are really difficult to farm.
I’ll be your huckleberry
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.
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.
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.
Fresh bamboo shoots.
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