Garlic is absolute crap these days. Don't get me wrong, I like the flavour, it's just that the fucking stuff hardly has any. Small bulbs, large bulbs, even sent off to a garlic farm on the IOW for some strong bulbs. Strong? Do me a favour! This may be a "when I was a lad" story, but I don't fucking care because it's true. When I started cooking for myself, 18 or so onwards, garlic was properly strong. Acid, pungent, gloriously smelly. You only needed one little clove for a meal, two if you wanted it really strong, and three if you weren't "seeing" anybody for a week or so. It took an hour of scrubbing with soap and hot water to get the smell off your hands - and it was back thirty minutes later. These days a quick rinse and any evidence of garlic is gone, if there ever was any. You can't smell it on anybody anymore and I have to stick about half a bulb into a meal to get any taste at all.
Things like growing at high speed with over-watering to promote size. Plus there's the "wuss" factor, whereby focus groups determine that the public prefers a "milder" flavour, so growers favour cultivars with less flavour, because that's what supermarkets demand. Stronger varieties become expensive to produce so far harder to find. Very sad.
Certainly tomatoes are generally flavourless from UK shops. The ones we grow ourselves are nothing special, but are a revelation compared with the very pretty but boring-as-shit ones from Tesco.
Even things like onions and potatoes which are less affected, are still weaker and less distinct from each other. The recipe says to buy a fluffy potato like a Russet or King Edward for mash, what I find is that almost anything will produce the same not-especially-good mash these days, because the growers don't want a highly distinctive product. They want an "all-rounder" with vague characteristics of the variety they're supposed to be producing. That way they sell to a wider market.