Are the Japanese ultra expensive fruits actually tasty? This is Ruby Roman which broke the record by selling a bunch for 8000 dollars or 315 per fruit.
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They're tasty, but they're never worth the money.
yes, and your life will be ruined by tasting them just once
All really convincing answers. I can't decide.
I do believe you can reach some kind of autistic perfection when farming small plots, but at the end aren't really good seeds obtained from large scale farming the most important thing?
The draw isn't the flavor, it's the price. People have an inherent desire to have what others can't, and will justify the expense to themselves after the fact.
Take wagyu for example; all the fun of eating a piece of beef dipped in tallow, but people still pay $30 a pound for it because it's prohibitively expensive. You'd have to be poor to not enjoy it, right?
The grapes could taste like sawdust and sulfur, but people would still buy them just to say they could.
Also there is a tradition in Japan of bringing gifts for certain things and fruit is very popular. You buy someone a mango that costs $50 as a status item as much as anything else.
I've had those $100 melons twice. Far juicier and sweeter than the average, but I wouldn't pay that much for a good melon.
This already happens with produce, the good stuff goes to the well heeled markets who will pay anything, and the not so good stuff goes to the price sensitive markets. Anyone who lives in a posh neighborhood who was surprised at the produce in poor neighborhoods or vice versa may have seen this in action (it doesn't happen in all markets and in many cases the price differences are just "what the market will bear" for the exact same shit, but segmentation does happen)
It's just easier and more market-efficient to do extreme segmentation in markets where the producers are within very close range of all possible buyers both poor and rich, and the materials can be transported in such a way that the small differences survive the trip. This creates incentives to do no-expense-spared optimizations on the produce for very small niche segments and in Japan obviously you're going to have autists with money, so there you go
Remember that wine is just an agricultural fruit product that happens to travel better than freshly picked, and this exact same phenomenon developed with wine, it's just a bigger (global) market so you do see those extremes and nobody (at least most people) thinks it's weird or funny.
for example, the mangos at lidl are either green stones or rotten and half fermented to the core and there's never any in between, like somehow the mangos go through a form of sublimation and completely skip over the edible phase
Or every single onion is rotten when you slice into it, that one is always fun.
That's because you're dumb. The japanese market for expensive japanese fruit exists because of rich people in tokyo, within a few hours of the farm. The international market for expensive french wine all over the world exists because wine bottles exist. If you're having trouble undersatnding the purpose of a wine bottle, go to your nearest bottle shop and have them explain.
Well yes It makes more sense now
Your wine example just invalidated all of your post. How can you compare delicate, perishable fruit and produce with something transported in glass or oak or tetrapak with really an undefined expiration date.
also you can't explain japan propensity for boutique fruits with "autists with money". there's something there, i'm not an expert but I think it has more to do with the high cost of labour and maybe scarcity of adequate land for produce and cultural low intake of fresh produce and fruits in their diets.
Also you are conveniently forgetting all the extremely tasty and also cheap produce from the subtropical and tropical belt from peru to morocco to turkey to sea mainly consumed by a local population with a diet rich in fruit and produce.
let's take another transformed agricultural produce like wine, in this case:hashish. The highest quality is notoriously consumed by the local producers, and this notwithstanding the extreme market pressure. same goes for cocaine.
>How can you compare delicate, perishable fruit and produce with something transported in glass or oak or tetrapak with really an undefined expiration date.
Wine is available at $3 and $3000 - that's why it's comparable.
>high cost of labour
Japan has very low wages.
I haven't tried any expensive Japanese fruit myself. From what I've heard they taste better than standard fruit, but not enough to justify the prices on taste alone. The primary draw is the flawless appearance and large size. This category of fruit is bought as high-end gifts for business associates and corporate clients. Similar to expensive fountain pens. A ridiculously expensive pen isn't going to write that much better than an reasonably priced pen, but it's going to look and feel like an exclusive and prestigious item. Same thing goes for expensive fruit vs reasonably priced regular fruit.
defintive answer
This happens because Japan is a small island with no land and they have a huge economy. They have to market stuff like kobe and wagyu, and these fruits, as special and fancy because of their density. Thats about it.
They are far better, imagine comparing a mango grown by the hundreds from one tree compared to a mango tree that grows 6 fruit total per year.
I have never in my entire life had sweeter fruits than the super expensive ones from Japan.
The mango for example was 36% sugar.
japan is a gift giving culture.
you're expected to give gifts all the time to people, even people you dont necessarily like or care about, just because social expectations require you to.
even if you go on a business trip you're expected to buy snacks for all of your coworkers.
so usually these really expensive "$300 for 2 strawberries" kind of deals are either bought as fancy gifts, or sometimes by fancy restaurants who want "specific product from specific region folded over 1000 times" for their restaurant.
"Premium fruit" in japanese market is literally rich people's meme. It is about buying "face" value and send the product attached to other people to show your face value to them.
Blame Confucian philosophy.