Ask Lemmy

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’m visiting Bangkok currently, so: definitely custard apples and mangosteens. Snake fruits and guava and the specific type of tangerines they use as “oranges” over here, too. And the green skinned “sweet oranges” which are also awesome. And like all the various types of mangos you can get in Thailand.

Also, I’m taking “available” to mean “purchasable, and ripened mostly on the vine”, because the stuff that gets shipped internationally is picked SUPER unripe just so it doesn’t spoil before sale.

Basically, I would fucking LOVE it if there was a Thai grocery in my city that flagrantly violated the Washington Treaty.

For real though, if you ever get the chance to try a ripe custard apple, they’re absolutely fucking delicious. Can’t recommend it enough.

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.

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 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'm Canadian but for some reason you never see tangerines anymore. Plenty of other citrus but not tangerines

I also would like to see pink and red fleshed apples in the store. And pawpaws. I sometimes get some from my local farmer friend and they are SO good but hard to come by.

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.

Finger limes

I have a hard time finding black currant

Fiddleheads

Thin-walled bell peppers like you find in Japan and China. Even the local Asian grocery stores don't sell them, and I can find pretty much anything else.

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.

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.