I grow our own vegetables. Many hybrid and heirloom varieties are bred for flavor rather than for commercial appeal and travel. There are entire species on the allotment that you can’t easily buy in stores because of this - like salsify, a root vegetable that tastes of fish and shellfish. Our neighbours happily take it to make vegan latkes of alarming similarity to fishcakes. You cannot sell it in stores because - despite looking like a white parsnip - it turns brown when you pick it if you scrape/bruise/cut the white root in any way, or damage the delicate little hairs, for some reason, it BLEEDS RED and is very upsetting to look at.
There are whole classes of foods like this. Foods that just don’t ship well or look good on supermarket shelves. Forbidden fruits. Vegetables that bleed and taste like meat. Sorry about this
This website is one of my fav places to find interesting heirloom stuff! I ordered a bunch of seeds to try growing next year I’m really excited about!
Lycopersicum is the first of a series of visual archives that will display the mindboggeling diversity of agricultural cultivars.
It is a logic extension of the Mutatoproject, which focuses on the suppression of mutation and polymorphism in our industrial food system.
The title ‘Lycopersicum’ is part of the biological term for the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), thus this first series solely focuses on tomato-cultivars.
