Far be it for me to argue with Brad DeLong about economics, but his response to a commenter bemoaning the absence of fresh, taste-driven produce during his childhood seems a bit off-base. Rubber tomatoes, the commenter writes, were all the stores carried, because they were all that would survive the trip, all that would endure throughout the entire year, all that seemed profitable. In reply, Brad says, "Why didn't you taste a tomato worth eating for the first twenty years of your life? What stopped you? Was some commissar standing over your parents waving a kalishnikov? Or did your parents just not think it was worth the extra money?"
Or maybe there weren't any around. As I said above, I would never argue with Brad about economics. But I will let Joel Waldfogel do so, by way of his new book The Tyranny of the Market. As he argues, the market often makes decisions much as a crude central planner would make them, advantaging majority preferences to the point that minority products just about vanish from the market. So it may well be that in the days of the rubber tomato's hegemony, in the place where Brad's commenter lived, there simply weren't any delicious, flavorful, tomatoes. There wasn't a farmer's market, or a specialty produce store. There was just the type of tomato that the local grocery thought would make them the most money. And that was a rubbery tomato. In recent years, Whole Foods and others have shown that consumers will pay for better produce, and eating seasonally has come into vogue, so minority preferences in food have grown large enough to give most urban and upscale customers access to finer products. But that's hardly a universal situation even now, and it certainly wasn't then. You could go through life never tasting a good tomato because you simply didn't know there was any type of tomato beyond what you bought at Safeway.
