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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: 2) by bradley13 on Monday January 30 2017, @11:00AM
Fresh produce markets are a feature through much of Europe. Even the supermarkets here are getting the message, selling produce "from the local region". Both of these support smaller growers, with short transport distances, who can then sell specialty products like heirloom fruits and veggies.
It's been a while since I was in the US, but my impression was that places like Whole Foods have usurped this market. Their stuff didn't strike me as any better than what was in the normal supermarket (although they did have a fancier import section), but the prices - geez - people pay that?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 30 2017, @04:31PM
It's the "Magical Supermarket Portal" myth that obtains in urban America. Unless the produce is carried into and out of the magical supermarket portal, it can't be edible or good for you. Other produce might have dirt on it, which is widely known to be poisonous, or have a little bit of insect nibbling at the edges, and that could give you the plague and wipe out your entire neighborhood before you know it. So it's super, super important to pay Whole Foods $5-6/lb to carry it into its magical supermarket portal for you.
I have personally seen people protest vociferously, even physically resist, consumption of non-magical supermarket portal produce until morsels are forced into their mouths and the light of understanding comes into their eyes. Shy of that, you could drop those people into the Garden of Eden, surrounded by luscious vegetables and fruits of every description, and they would starve to death, paralyzed by fear of eating something that had not had the magical inventory wand passed over it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Monday January 30 2017, @06:14PM
It's understandable, man.
If you have an allergic reaction to a fruit in the Garden of Eden, who's your family going to sue? God?