Most veggies in grocery stores are bred for things like appearance and shelf life more than actual quality.

I think tomatoes are a prime example of this.

Tomatoes bruise easily, and people kind of want to buy the perfect, round, bright red tomatoes, not a weird lumpy-looking, funny colored bruised up one.

So big farmers grow tomatoes that look pretty, and are sturdier to better handle being shipped thousands of miles, that will last better on grocery store shelves, etc.

But there’s trade-offs there for things like texture and taste. That perfect-looking tomato may be bland and watery.

They may also be doing stuff like picking them before they’re fully ripe and artificially ripening them with ethylene gas or something later in a warehouse.

When you get tomatoes from a smaller, local farmer though, they don’t have to be shipped as far, or sit around in a warehouse or grocery store as long, so they don’t need to pick varieties based on shelf life and ability to stand up to shipping, and can instead grow varieties that taste good. And they can pick them at their peak ripeness because they’re going more directly from the field to the consumer and they don’t have to rely on tricks like ethylene.

My wife isn’t a picky eater, but when we first started dating she thought that she didn’t really like tomatoes.

But she had only ever had regular grocery store tomatoes.

Until we moved in together and I grew some myself. Then she discovered that tomatoes can actually be really good. Now she can’t get enough of them, as long as they’re good tomatoes.

And I didn’t even grow any particularly fancy tomatoes. That first year that I made a convert of her I just had some regular ol’ beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes that I picked up as pre-started plants from Walmart or home Depot or somewhere like that, and grew them in pots on the patio of our apartment. Basically entry-level gardening, but that was enough to blow her mind.

Another year I grew, I think the variety was called something like “mucho nacho” jalapenos. We love jalapenos to begin with, but holy shit. That particular variety was everything we ever wanted a jalapeno to be. We had one or two other varieties going that year to have a comparison, but that one stood head-and-shoulders above the others, bigger, a little hotter, and just plain tastier.

And farmers can probably get their hands on even better varieties than whatever I could get at a big box hardware store, and have the know-how to really give them ideal growing conditions.

No, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying.

I do believe you’re being 100% genuine.

But your genuine self looks a hell of a lot like a troll to the vast majority of people who aren’t going to comb through your comment history and realize that you have mental health issues. They’re just going to treat you like a troll and move on with their day.

And regardless of whether you’re genuine or trolling, at the end of the day, your intent doesn’t really matter, if it’s annoying, disruptive, etc. the mods are going to treat it as trolling, and they are right to do so.

OP, after scrolling through your history and the modlog a bit, I don’t get the impression that you’re a troll, but you absolutely do come off as one or at least as a real asshole in nearly everything you’ve posted to Lemmy since creating this account. In fact, I can see that I’ve personally downvoted you a couple of times for it.

But going through that history, I can see that you have some mental health/neurological issues. That kind of makes things fall into place.

I have a few friends in similar boats. If they were more-techy people I suspect their comment histories from when they’ve had an episode or gone off their meds or what-have-you would look a lot like yours. They’re good people, who unfortunately have issues that make them sometimes seem like they aren’t. And I feel like that’s the case with you.

I won’t pretend to know what the best course of action for you here is. I don’t know you, I don’t know what kind of help you’re already getting or what different kinds you may need, or what you would ideally like your life to look like on or off of Lemmy.

But you’re on here complaining about getting banned by mods, so I think it’s safe to say that you don’t enjoy that.

So I think you need to realize that if you act the way you have been, that’s going to continue happening. It feels very trollish, annoying and disruptive, and honestly maybe even a bit dangerous in some cases. I definitely get why mods have felt like they need to step in with you, I’d probably do the same in their shoes. Their role isn’t to cater to you, but to protect the community as a whole. Sometimes they step out of line to be sure, but I’m just not really seeing that in your history.

So you gotta change something, man. Maybe it’s something small, like exercising a little extra mindfulness and taking a moment to think about what you just wrote before hitting “post”

Maybe it’s something bigger-therapy, medication, inpatient treatment (all easier said than done, I know)

Maybe it’s something else entirely.

But if you don’t like the bans and having your comments removed and such, the fix is something that needs to change on your end, not the mods’.

I doubt you’re going to be too interested in taking that advice from a stranger on the internet, but I figured I’d al least try.