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Scientists have quantified flavor-associated chemicals in 398 varieties of tomatoes in order to create a "roadmap" for improving flavor:
Bite into a supermarket tomato and you'll probably notice something missing: taste. Scientists think they can put the yum back into the grocery tomato by tinkering with its genetic recipe. Researchers are reinstalling five long-lost genetic traits that add much of the sweet-yet-acidic taste that had been bred out of mass-produced tomatoes for the past 50 years. They're using mostly natural breeding methods, not genetic modification technology.
[...] One key issue is size. Growers keep increasing individual tomato size and grow more per plant. The trouble is that there is a limit to how much sugar each tomato plant can produce. Bigger tomatoes and more of them means less sugar per tomato and less taste, Klee said. So Klee and colleagues looked at the genomes of the mass-produced tomato varieties and heirloom tomatoes to try to help the grocery tomatoes catch up to their backyard garden taste.
[...] Klee isolated some sugar genes and ones more geared to pure taste, but figured those won't work as well because they clash against shipping and size needs. So he found areas that affect the aroma of tomatoes but not size or heartiness. Reintroducing those into mass-produced tomatoes should work because smell is a big factor in taste, he said. Altering genes in a lab would make the process faster, but because of consumer distrust and regulations, Klee is opting for natural breeding methods – with help from an electric toothbrush to spread pollen.
It sounds like the quest for a tasty tomato will be delayed for years because GMOs are scaaaary.
Also at NYT.
A chemical genetic roadmap to improved tomato flavor (DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1556) (DX)
Previously: Breeding Wildness Back Into Our Fruits and Vegetables
Two Approaches to Enhancing Tomato Flavor
Tomatoes Grown in Australian Desert from Sunshine and Seawater
(Score: 5, Insightful) by nyder on Monday January 30 2017, @01:43AM
So instead of the easy solution which is to grow smaller and less tomatoes per plant (and maybe figure out some vertical farming or something to get more plants) instead we rather fuck with the genetics of the tomatoes to make them taste better.
Interesting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @01:56AM
Factory farming, brah.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 30 2017, @01:59AM
I'm not sure that the relationship between yield and taste was always so clear, until recent decades.
Varieties not intended for supermarket can probably get away with genetic taste loss, because cooked tomato paste is something entirely different.
Finally, there is another way to divert taste in supermarket tomatoes. Pump in ethylene gas. Artificial ripening. [npr.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dunbal on Monday January 30 2017, @02:03AM
It's your own fault, because as a consumer you automatically pick the cheapest tomato not the best tasting tomato. So don't complain when producers focus on maximizing yield instead of taste. If you really care about tomato taste you'd buy from your local farmers' markets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @02:35AM
Because everyone lives next to a farmer's market, right? Oh wait...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @03:39AM
In the US you tend to either live near farmers' markets or near the farmers. There are exceptions like Alaska where there's basically no availability of fresh vegetables during winter when you move further north. But, most Americans have access to at least one of the two.
The bigger issue tends to be the ability to afford to buy the good stuff.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @05:26AM
In the US you tend to either live near farmers' markets or near the farmers. There are exceptions like Alaska where there's basically no availability of fresh vegetables during winter when you move further north. But, most Americans have access to at least one of the two.
Ah, yes. Who can forget those famous areas... The Farms of Manhattan. The Ranches of Chicago. The Orchards of Los Angeles. :)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 30 2017, @11:28AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 30 2017, @04:08PM
That's correct. There are green markets everywhere in NYC. They are amply supplied by farms that, believe it or not, surround the urban area in Long Island, New Jersey, Upstate NY, and Connecticut. It's not a long drive to get to them, either--about an hour, depending on traffic. Many people have an image of NYC stretching forever, but the boundary is more abrupt and comes sooner than you'd think, and then suddenly you're in rural, pastoral settings.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday January 30 2017, @01:58PM
If there was demand for it you would bet your ass someone would open a specialty store/section in your supermarket and sell you tasty vegetables for a profit. But that's not going to happen because people would complain about the 40% price difference and continue to buy frozen bulk veggies as they sip on their 1000 calorie artificially sweetened and flavored coffee ground residue at $15 a cup. People SAY they want tasty veggies. But they really don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @03:17PM
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday January 30 2017, @05:38PM
There are plenty of farmers markets in NYC. We also have Farms out on long island in Suffolk county, though many were converted to wineries. And we still have lots of farms upstate in the rest of NY as well as our neighbors in NJ. And up until a few years ago, the last privately owned farm in Queens closed. I remember walking to it from university on 73rd ave and buying fresh produce before getting on the Q27. Though, the Queens county farm museum is still operational. But I am not sure if they sell produce.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday January 30 2017, @11:33AM
Why is this marked troll? It's true. Consumers in the US and, to a slightly lesser extent, the USA treat size, shape, and colour as the primary characteristics when buying a tomato. As a result, sellers have optimised for these to the extent that slightly misshapen tomatoes are thrown away. The tomatoes taste of water, but that's okay because consumers don't care. Pop over to France or Italy and consumers judge them primarily by taste. You'll get ugly tomatoes in weird shapes and colours and they'll taste of tomato.
I can usually buy tasty tomatoes from a shop near here, but they cost a little bit more than the supermarket's expensive range (which taste faintly of tomato) and a lot more than the generic value brand tomatoes that taste of water (which, in turn, are a lot more expensive than iceberg lettuce, which is the most cost-effective way of buying crunchy, on-frozen, water).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 30 2017, @04:16PM
That's the thing about buying flavorful food. You might spend a little more, but you will enjoy it more than twice as much while needing about 1/3 as much of it as you would of the more insipid varieties. You want to eat it slower, because it's worth savoring, and that saves on the calories, aids digestion, and adds an ineffable sense of well-being.
The example of iceberg lettuce is a good one. It has no flavor, so people pile on lots of dressing, shredded cheese, and bacon bits and before you know it it has as many calories as a Big Mac. Choose a fine mesclun, arugula, & radicchio mix and mix it with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and you'll enjoy it far more and it will be better for you.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @06:13PM
Speak for yourself. I buy food ethically, unless it's too hard [youtube.com].
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 30 2017, @02:36AM
The University of Florida has run research farms for decades - my grandfather worked at one in the 1970s and 80s. They did hybridization programs (essentially genetic modification, without the fancy tools), to "improve" tomatoes for all that time. Their goal: shelf life. It was 70% about shelf life, 27% about looking good in the store, and they ran one little program to try to make a square tomato that fit better on a slice of bread. Nowhere at all in those programs did they study or control for taste or nutrition.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday January 30 2017, @03:00AM
If by fuck with genetics, you mean a continuation of the hundreds of years of plant breeding, then yes. They are using standard breeding techniques just with better information about the trade offs than we had a hundred years ago.
That may indeed mean growing plants with fewer and smaller tomatoes on them in the end.
Meanwhile, since my back has healed up, I will dig my vegetable garden plot and plant more flavorful varieties for my family.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday January 30 2017, @06:54AM
That was one thing that disturbed me about lots of the fruit and veg for sale in US supermarkets, the stuff had virtually no taste. I've always liked nectarines and peaches, but when I bought a bag full of them at Vons, if you'd blindfolded me and fed me one I couldn't have told you what it was I was eating. The friend that I was staying with mentioned this to me, that people sometimes asked him what was so special about nectarines, because all they'd ever had were the tasteless supermarket ones. They actually had no taste, or at least not enough to be able to tell what it was apart from some kind of stonefruit. Apples were even worse, just bland pulpy masses. Cherries were vaguely cherry-like, but nothing like the flavour I'm used to. How do you do that to fruit? Are they grown in chemical vats or something?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 30 2017, @08:58AM
How do you do that to fruit?
Just add water. Seriously. The simplest and cheapest way to make higher yield by mass vegetables and fruit is to increase the water content of the food.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 30 2017, @04:22PM
Luckily there is some relief from that particular tedium if you live in the right apple-growing localities. NY and NJ have a lot of organic apple orchards with lots of tasty varieties. Not every store carries them, but the ubiquitous green markets do, as do some of the chains like Fairways or Whole Foods. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's a similar situation in the Yakima in Washington state.
Logistically there's no reason that better fruit couldn't be more widely distributed in America, so maybe it's possible for people who've been limited to Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples to get them if they demand them. Jonah Gold and Honey Crisp are worth asking for.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @04:36PM
You can't patent common sense (growing natural tomatoes with good flavor, perhaps vertically to get more output per square foot), but you *can* patent genetic tweaks (and patent-troll neighbors whose plants are contaminated with pollen from patented plants). It's win-bigly/lose, and who really cares about the losers. You and me, and 99.999% of humanity, sure, but not those who really count: Monsanto, Trump, Putin, and our other illustrious overlords. All hail the new world order. It's one redeeming quality: it won't be around long (but then, neither will we).