Originally Posted by the casual quilter
Another way of looking at this is: do tomatoes taste better if the field is plowed by hand with a stick instead of a tractor?
!
Neither! Any tomato in this country that is grown in a field, no matter how it is plawed, is of a variety where hardiness is the primary characteristic and they are picked green.
A tomato tastes best grown right outside your own door, only hardy enough to be carried by hand from garden to kitchen and picked at the peak of ripeness while warm from the sun.
Those things sold in the vast majority of grocery stores are... something else. I'm not sure what but they sure don't seem anything close to the ones from my garden.