Why tomatoes taste bad Genetic engineers are not only fixing the problem, they're adding all kinds of wonderful new traits.
I only realised how totally tasteless tomatoes were when I purchased some heritage strain organic ones from a roadside smallholding in Cornwall. They literally blew me away. Without exaggeration, they must have had at least ten times the flavour of even premium vine tomatoes from supermarkets. The taste was almost overpowering...
In the meantime, though perhaps too late for this year's garden, we know to look for heirloom tomato varieties with those big unsightly shoulder ridges. Those are the ones with the flavor.
And then sometime in the 23rd century a patrolling starship will run across a DY-100 class sleeper ship filled with ridgeless red tomatoes... (Captain BLT will take one look at their clothing and interior decoration and know right away that they have no taste.)
Also be on the lookout for Tasti-Lee tomatoes, which are already showing up in some supermarkets. University of Florida research link
I would think they could introduce it into any tomato variety. I think the next hurdle is creating giant, intelligent, killer tomatoes.
*ugh* Can't stand a lot of tomatoes these days these days . And tbh, I think a lot of it was caused by messing with them in the first place (genetically engineering them). They were good as is. Now they're just bland and mealy.
Actually no, it wasn't genetic engineering that caused them to lose their taste. It was traditional breeding that caused that, and genetic engineering is being used to fix it. 70 years go, when this change first happened, as stated at the beginning, genetic engineering wasn't even close to possible. I'll be interested to see how the anti-GMO crowd reacts to these tomatoes. They will be genetically modified to fix a gene that was damaged by traditional breeding and selection, so they will actually be more like heirloom varieties. Yet they will be GMOs.
Replacing a tomato gene with, er, a tomato gene may be genetic modification, but hardly as contentious as using, say, an octopus gene. Anyway, why bother ? Just reintroduce traditional tomato strains ?
The traditional strains were abandoned because of bruising problems, bad shape, and short shelf life, among other things. They didn't intend to lose the favor when they got rid of the other problems.
And I'll be avoiding them like the plague. They should let people choose what kinds of vegetables they want to eat and not force it upon them. Not everyone wants to eat genetically modified food. No matter how they try to dress it, it's still genetically modified.
We've been genetically modifying plants for hundreds of years. Where do you think Medelian Inheritance came from? Nobody is forcing you to eat anything.
Really. It's not like they're introducing spider and tick genes into tomatoes, they're reintroducing backyard-garden heirloom tomato genes, that are supposed to be there, into our artificially-created mass-produced factory tomatoes. But if your heart-felt beliefs overwhelm your distaste for eating cardboard produced by capitalist shipping concerns, then carry on. It will just leave more naturally tasty tomatoes for the rest of us.
Next up on SyFy: Octomato! More like thousands of years, if you go back to the beginning of agriculture. We've been doing the same thing with our domestic animals as well. As for adapting and modifying nature in a more general sense, we've been doing that ever since Homo erectus discovered fire.