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.
What I would give for an actual fresh greengrocer 😔
Move to straya, plenty of jobs atm, free healthcare, not a lot of homes and no where near the consumer brand choice. But it also means rich are not as rich, and no guns (by comparison) so kids are safe in schools!
Most supermarkets have plenty of fresh food, its better and cheaper to buy from farmers markets, but you can get by with the super chains( not going to get into the profiteering from them, save that for another day).
Fresh food is weirdly expensive in the US. Got to give the US props for being consistently expensive when it comes to health related expenses I guess.
It seems bizarre for such a rich country to have the priorities so backwards.
health and well being? Nah.
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.
Oh man - It always feels like the pawpaws just hang out for ages up in the canopy whole and unripe to me.
I should have said, a whole ripe one, yeah
My best advice would be once they start falling on their own try shaking them out of the tree. But don’t try shaking too hard because it’s completely possible to shake unripe ones out too…
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.
Drumstick 🤤🥺
I prefer the Kentucky Fried cultivar
You can eat the leaves too
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.
Big fan of cherimoya ✋ Looked into ordering some online once, the price is insane
I had a cherimoya in Spain and I LOVED it. Impossible to find here in NA though :(
I got mine from a higher end grocery store (Wegmans) so something like that is your best bet. Keep searching!
Ooo, the Ugli Fruit aka Jamaican Tangelo was good too that I found there!
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.They are now legal to grow in many states. Unfortunately still not going to find it in a grocery store most likely. I grow my own in the backyard so I can have some at least part of the year. They’re perennial, very easy to grow, and produce a ton of berries. Gooseberries were banned for similar reasons, but are now also legal in many states.
Yes! As a Scandinavian living in the US: I would love to see black currant, red currant, and gooseberries in my grocery store.
And cloudberries! I want to taste cloudberries!
Yes! Forgot about those.
Gooseberries grow like crazy in Colorado, every other garden around here has at least one bush. Never seen them at a grocer though.
Strawberries that taste like they did 10+ years ago?
If you can’t grow your own or go to farmers market. Get them when it’s early in the season (I.e. now) as a big reason they usually taste like shit is because they are harvested unripe and then ripen in transit, which causes them to be light in colour, watery and have that white centre to them.
But early in the season they are /more likely/ to be allowed to ripen on the plant.
I’ve been eating loads of strawberries this past week from my local big chain supermarket and they have mostly been amazing (and cheap too)
Wild strawberries are amazing. Sad they’re so hard to get a substantial amount of.
When I was a kid in the 80’s there was a place my Grandmother used to take us to that had hay rides to take you out into their strawberry fields where you’d pick your own berries and pay like 50¢ per pound.
Good memories.
Jackfruit
I’ve seen the big chain grocery stores carrying that around here. I have no idea how to eat it or anything though.
I remember getting one when one of the supermarkets around here carried them and theyre huge fruits. Probably 20 pounds of fruit that we ate from it and by the time we were done I never wanted to see another one again lol. I wouldn’t mind trying them again now but probably maybe just a pound not a whole fruit.
A restaurant out here had a great jackfruit sloppy Joe for vegetarians but I think they discontinued serving it.
All those different kinds of banana. All we get is cabendish which is, like, the worst of all the amazing banana varieties.
We have cavandish and red bananas here but none of the more interesting ones like the giant hawaiian cultivar etc. So completely agreed.
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.
Agree. Good apricots are elusive. I have had them but 99% of the time they go straight from underripe to mealy.
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.
Freshly cut hearts of palm.
We have the canned ones which arent bad but now im curious what the fresh cut ones are like
Add fresh bamboo shoots too. Wonderful delicate flavor. Oh, and banana flowers.
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.
Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores,
Visit the Nordics in June-July.
Markets full of them.
Hell, you don’t need to buy any, just walk into any forest and start picking.
Guavas
I just got into guava recently. I live in Jersey and my local ShopRite started stocking clamshells with six guavas or so, ranging in size from a goofball to something larger than a goofball but smaller than a baseball. Maybe like billiards ball sized. I’d never eaten them before like a month ago, and so the seeds threw me T first, but I’ve got the technique down now and shit, when they’re ripened, nice and soft, they are fantastic. I worry about the day when I get to ShopRite and the guavas are no longer.
Literally about to go to whole foods to buy guavas because you reminded me of the taste 😭🤤 You should cut them and season them with salt and chili powder, they taste fantastic that way.
How bigs a goofball? The ones at work are always huge.
They’re the size of my kids, since they’re generally the target if my references to goofballs.
And I guess my phone thought changing golfball to goofball was what I needed. Maybe I should read a little better what I write. Maybe next time.
We have guava in the stores here in Florida but I’ve seen rhubarb twice in half a century.
I’ve seen rhubarb in the Midwest fwiw
I think it grows in colder places and isn’t popular enough to get imported here, I can get so many fruits that are exotic elsewhere, but apples and potatoes are expensive here, and rhubarb I just never see.
I’m biased towards tropical fruits so I think you have the better end of the deal. I actually thought rhubarb was a herb of some kind, learned that it was a fruit after your comment
It’s a fruit?! I thought you used the stalk, which looks somewhat like celery in shape. /a Midwesterner who has eaten rhubarb pies made/grown by a great aunt
Botanically it isn’t a fruit but it is a culinary fruit because of how it is used.
I have a 6 foot by 6 foot patch of rhubarb in Wisconsin that’s completely gone to seed because I don’t have enough freezer space to keep any more of it. It makes a great simple syrup for cocktails and of course classics like crumble and pie.
When I was a kid, we had a patch of it in the back yard and mom would make desserts out of it. Or wed just eat it raw.
I was born, raised, and currently live in Florida. The guavas in Florida supermarkets are closer-tasting to plastic than the guavas I’ve had in the Caribbean.
Yeah I have only used them sort of unripe, for compote with so much sugar. But they do grow here.
Funny, I’m in NJ, and within the past month I’ve seen guava and rhubarb for the first time ever on the shelves. Haven’t gotten rhubarb yet, I really don’t know anything about it.
Don’t. It’s evil. Even though you might like it, it’s not worth the risk.
Holy cow, I hate rhubarb. We always had it in the garden and my grandma used to bake cakes with it. Thos sweet cakes would be sooo good, but that pos plant always ruined them to non-edible garbage. At least for me, some people like that taste, though. (Europe)
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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.
I get them in Texas from the Korean market. I don’t know that they’re available year round though.
I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find any via Asian markets in the Pacific Northwest.
Oooh I haven’t checked there, thank you!
I keep thinking back to this. I believe persimmons are in season in the fall, so if you don’t find them now, go back in a few months and you should have better luck.
We have persimmons in Michigan
Those are very late season fruit. I wasn’t aware they weren’t available up north. Look for them starting in October, I think.
Durians
They’re readily available in the LA area. You just need to visit an asian specialty market.
