Supermarket Tomatoes May Soon Regain Lost Flavour

Over our 12,000 years as an agricultural society, farmers have selected certain strains of fruits and vegetables that demonstrated particular qualities — specifically fruit size, shelf-life and growth speed.

- Darcy Simonis

This selective production has meant that certain qualities were encouraged while others were suppressed. Due to the primitive nature of the science at the time it was also hard to fully understand the effects this would have. In the case of tomatoes, it made them bigger, last longer and grow faster but in return they lost the iconic flavor that made them so popular.

Though we may imagine this happened recently, it was during the earlier years of our modern era circa 1800, well before the advent of modern genetically modified organisms (GMOs), that tomatoes started to lose their flavor. The rsult? Store bought tomatoes are today infamous for being bland.

Scientists have discovered that domesticated tomatoes are missing over 5,000 genomes compared to their wilder cousins, including the one that gives them their distinctive taste. Thanks to this research, store bought tomatoes may soon regain their flavour.