How the supermarket tomato lost its flavor
The demise of the tomato’s flavor started about seventy years ago when growers noticed that some tomatoes turned red from green uniformly when they ripened. Back then, most tomatoes had shoulders—a raised area near the depression where the tomato attaches to the stem—that turned red slower than the rest of the tomato. The green shoulders made it difficult for farmers to tell when the tomato was ready to harvest, and shoppers did not like the look of them either.
So when the uniformly colored tomatoes randomly appeared, tomato breeders realized its potential. The effect that caused the green shoulders to disappear was due to a random genetic mutation, which was dubbed the “uniform ripening” trait. Farmers began selecting seeds from the uniformly green tomatoes and crossing them with other uniformly green tomatoes to create the visually perfect commercial tomatoes that we have today.
Because of the rudimentary understanding of genetics at that time, neither farmers nor researchers knew that the “uniform ripening” trait came with a trade off; it also disabled a gene in a tomato that regulates chlorophyll. Ann Powell, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, and her research group recently reported in a 2012 Science article that the chlorophyll concentrated in the green shoulders also increased the level of flavor-creating sugars for tomatoes. When the tomatoes’ green shoulders were bred out, so were the chlorophyll and extra sugars—and the tomato’s flavor. And this mutation was ubiquitous; when Powell and her colleagues examined 25 commercial tomato varieties from all over the world, they found the uniform ripening flavor reducing mutation in all of them.
. 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.
