The Vine Ripened Myth

A question I am frequently asked is “Should I leave tomatoes on the vine until they’re ripe for best flavor?”

I have discovered fully ripe tomatoes which were obscured by foliage and found that they tasted the same as ones we ripened indoors on a counter. There have been numerous reports of other people leaving tomatoes on the vine until fully ripe, and reporting no noticeable improvement in flavor over ones that were picked after first blush.

At this point, I consider vine ripening to be a marketing myth.

The biggest causes of poor flavor in grocery store tomatoes are:

• Varieties selected for productivity, early harvest, uniform size and shape, and disease resistance/tolerance.
• They are grown in nearly sterile soil and fed chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• They are picked completely green (1st breaker stage), and shipped off to an ethylene gas chamber to artificially ripen. Remember: “Vine ripened” has no legal definition.
• They are shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks.
• They are then refrigerated again at the grocery store until they are put out for sale.

All of these steps conspire to produce a completely flavorless tomato.

In S.E. Texas, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, squirrels, mockingbirds, and unexpected afternoon rainstorms make leaving tomatoes on the vine until fully ripe a dicey proposition.

P.S. Out of curiosity, I took one of my best homegrown heirloom tomatoes and refrigerated it for 24 hours and the loss of flavor was shocking. It was almost as bad as a grocery store tomato.