I've eaten perfectly good apples grown locally over north-west Europe. The point is that they are grown for the locality.
I must disagree about tomatoes. There was nothing like eating a cherry tomato from my own plot after it had ripened in the sun ... but neither is there anything as good as eating sun-ripened toms straight off the vine in Greece or Italy.
The problem here is that large commercial tomato growers have their plants under shelter, well-irrigated and dosed with chemicals then treated in other ways to transport and ripen them at the 'correct' time.
But it all comes back down to growing and eating locally ....
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Originally Posted by Airehead .............nevertheless I can give a subjective answer - I define an English apple by virtue of the fact that of the most flavoured varieties there is none from any other source which can match the English-grown ones for flavour and texture. It is true that there are acceptable ones from other countries which can fill gaps between our seasons but none can touch our best in their season. If this is true, there must be a reason.
On the face of it this is, I must admit, at variance with what I know to be a fact where tomatoes are concerned and assume to be so for other fruits and vegetables - which is that the flavour is in the variety and not in the culture. In other words it should make no difference where a given variety is grown. But I do not believe that, for example, the French Golden Delicious is the same variety as our Golden Delicious. I think that our best varieties have not been exported and are uniquely English. This has been stated to me as a positive truth at some time in the distant past but unfortunately I can not remember the source.
As regards the possibility of their having been brought from Hungary/etc, I do not know the facts about this, but it seems to me to be very likely that though this might be the origin of the parents of our established varieties, at least some of the latter have been discovered as random seedlings. This has certainly been described to me in my schooldays as the origin of Cox's Orange Pippin. (Which, as I have already mentioned, rattles when shaken if it is genuine - and many of them in the supermarkets labelled "Cox's Apples" do not rattle) |