Tomatoes: Agronomists Admit "Oops, We Forgot the Flavor"

I was informed, by Amanda Alverez of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, that  commercial tomato growers “inadvertently” left the flavor out – as in “oops, I forgot to add the flavor.” She wrote:

“. . . Breeders selecting for uniform ripeness have inadvertently created tomatoes that are less sweet.” (Full Text)

“Less sweet” is an understatement for devoid of flavor. Think of how that sentence would have read had she in fact used “devoid of flavor.” It would also be fair to say Alverez’s “breeders” are members of the same agronomist cohort she later refers to as “researchers.” There is reason behind my headline.

She reports researchers, led by Ann Powell of the University of California-Davis, discovered the genetic switch that produces great looking, uniformly ripened, supermarket tomatoes also causes “dysfunctional chloroplasts.”

It’s a bad thing when the chloroplasts go dysfunctional. The result is a flavorless tomato, or more specifically a tomato deficient in sugar and antioxidants. Given that all plants are wondrous miniature chemical factories with biochemical machines called chloroplasts, obviously, in a tomato plant when enough of these are shut down it’s no longer fair to call the resulting fruit a tomato.

I think the commercial tomato growers have crossed that line. Calling a tomato a tomato simply because it matches our idealized visual image of a tomato is wildly superficial. After all, a machine could produce beautiful red edible tomatoes from cellulose, like the erotic edible undies, but they wouldn’t be tomatoes.

It’s a truth Alverez would rather not acknowledge, though all the facts in her story point in that direction. Instead, she happily announced in the story’s lead, “The competing priorities of tomato growers and foodies my finally find a happy medium, thanks to new research . . .”

But, the science is less promising. Further on she dashes that hope:

“Powell cautions that her finding is “not a cure-all for unflavorful tomatoes. Many factors go into a good-tasting tomato; this is one of several.””

I can think of three: fresh, ripe and in-season.