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this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Can't say I blame them for trying. Selling larger, more robust, and flavourless varieties worked on us with both chicken and tomatoes. The first time I tried a garden tomato was eye-opening. Would love to track down one of the farms selling the old chicken breeds as well, but I hear those are pretty expensive.
Tomatoes have the largest difference in quality, people often think they don't like tomatoes until they taste good heirloom ones.
Store tomatoes are bred for firmness.
The original cardboard tomato contained the rin gene. This completely shutdown the production of ethylene. These tomatoes never turned red until ethylene gas was applied externally.
These types fell out of favor when varieties with down regulated ethylene response and production were developed. These types will turn red but are always firm and mostly flavorless.
My heritage breeds grow slower and have less butcher weight than industrial farm raised chickens. The longer it takes to reach market weight the more feed I have to buy, so yeah, they're easily twice as expensive per pound. Its insane how cheap they're able to sell chicken. It gives people sticker shock when they see my price per pound. :(
For sure, you get what you pay for. If it takes twice as long to get them up to weight, it's no wonder they bred the chicken of tomorrow for mass consumption. I guess it's better to feed the masses than have chicken as a luxury food only. But as long as you still have the heritage breeds available, I guess we can have both! What do you raise? Any breed in particular that's worth looking for to try?
If you saw the misshapen horror of a bird that produced a single 2-pound chicken breast at $0.89 per pound, you wouldn't want to eat it. The amount of growth hormone and antibiotics crammed into these miserable animals is astounding. They have cysts. Open wounds. Broken legs and bald patches.
Every time I see it on sale at the grocery store, I grit my teeth.
and you also have to becareful what the description say on how its raise. like cage free, free range this can still be crammed inside a building next other dead birds. you have to look for pasture raised, garden raised.
Yep. To make things worse, Its actually unhealthy for that breed to live past market weight. They'll get so heavy they can't walk anymore and will also devolp all sorts of health problems even if they're free ranged. A sad state of being.
I raise Rhode Island Reds right now, part time with a foolish hope to full time farm someday. If you can find Bresse chicken it's supposed to be the Wagyu of the chicken world.
The tomatoes on the vine tend to have more flavor. But if you can find some locally grown ones they might be the best.
Yeah, that's what I get through the winter, then I grow tomatoes in the summer. But there youbhave to be careful too. Some seeds end up being the same mass produced crap that industrial farms use. I heard years back that a university in Florida had developed a varietal that solved all conventional problems with tomatoes for the big corporate farms but still managed to prioritize the taste. You could apparently order seeds online. Always wanted to try that.
maybe heirloom tomatoes?
Don't bother, those varieties are still pretty bland. They were still bred for shipping AKA firmness. So they were very slightly better than the ones you normally find at the grocery store.
My county's extension office does a spring fair where they sell about a hundred varieties of heirloom tomato seedlings. They're not bred for grocery stores and are delicious
Eventually when I retire, I am thinking of doing a little backcross breeding on OP tomatoes. Pulling in all the modern disease resistance package into the older varieties would make growing them much easier.
The hardest part is finding a pathologist to run the screens. I could also speed it up a bit with molecular markers but you can never completely trust them. You have to run the pathology screens.