So around here, in Elbonia, it&#x27;s still pretty common for people to grow their own stuff in the countryside. My grandmother still grows her own vegetables and still raises chicken.<p>She doesn&#x27;t use fertilizer, but the conditions are quite ideal for a lot of vegetables, including -- yes -- tomatoes.<p>The difference is astounding. Simply slicing one or two tomatoes is enough to make my whole kitchen <i>smell</i> like tomatoes. My palate is so accustomed to supermarket chicken that I literally cannot eat the ones she raises. I have to drown the meat in spices -- the flavour is so strong (and pretty different from that of &quot;mass-produced&quot; chicken) that it makes me vomit. Fortunately, I don&#x27;t have that trouble with her tomatoes.<p>The catch is, indeed, that the yield is fairly low. There&#x27;s no such thing as more than one crop per year, either -- she has tomatoes throughout the summer, but that&#x27;s it. The only exception are cherry tomatoes, which will sometimes grow another generation of fruit in early autumn, and they ripen pretty fast, but that&#x27;s it. Also, the ripening process is fairly slow; by mid-autumn or so, there are still enough unripe tomatoes for her to pickle a few jars.<p>(What, you don&#x27;t pickle tomatoes when they&#x27;re green in the States? You have no idea what you&#x27;re missing!)<p>That being said, their color is pretty uniform. I don&#x27;t have a picture right now, since they&#x27;re out of season, but they really look OK, most of them are no different, in terms of look, from what you can see in supermarkets. Sometimes they grow in a somewhat weird shape (e.g. some of them get rather bulgy, but maybe that&#x27;s a distinct cultivar, I don&#x27;t know; others look perfectly round) but, if you allow them to ripen, they&#x27;re pretty uniformly red. However, at that stage they&#x27;re basically impossible to sell in supermarkets or even at farmers&#x27; markets, they&#x27;ll go bad within days of being picked, even if you refrigerate them. People basically pick them right before a meal (worst case scenario, they&#x27;ll pick a bunch in the morning so that they can chill in the fridge for an hour or two -- summers are pretty hot here, so if you pick them before lunch, you&#x27;ll be eating really warm tomatoes).<p>Edit: I&#x27;ve seen someone here claiming that plain yogurt is <i>supposed</i> to be plain.<p>Fuck no. Plain yogurt is so thick, soury and flavourful that, unless you&#x27;ve grown up with it, it&#x27;s an acquired taste. My grandmother never raised cattle -- I first tasted plain, home-made yogurt at one of her relatives in a remote-ish village when I was 14 or so. I hated it, despite having eaten plain yogurt from the supermarket before, and it took me a whole summer to get accustomed to the taste. It&#x27;s also <i>incredibly</i> filling, you can&#x27;t eat more than a bowl.