Editorials: Good science and bad tomatoes

Great tomatoes, like great people, come in all shapes, sizes and colors. The luscious summer heirlooms that will soon arrive on our tables will be not just red, but orange, green or even deep purple. They'll be knobby and seamed, too. And unlike supermarket tomatoes, they'll stay green longer around the shoulders because the top ripens last.

Commercial tomatoes are a different story. Around 1930, a new mutation was used in producing a variety of tomato called the All Red, which featured a uniform ripening trait that was soon widely adopted to exploit shopper preferences for vividly red tomatoes. No more green shoulders.

And, as it turns out, a lot less taste. Scientists now find that by breeding out the green shoulders, the industry inadvertently disabled some genes involved in ripening. These supermarket robo-tomatoes lost some of their ability to make sugar and also are short on carotenoids, which are believed to enhance flavor.

At first blush, this is yet another Frankenfood horror story: Human tampering wrings the taste out of a delicious and healthful food, showing the dangers of hubris. In fact, though, it's yet another demonstration that our food future will involve more science, not less.

Getting there will take time. Meanwhile, the tomato saga echoes the dismal history of Red Delicious apples. In that case, supermarkets offered premiums for redder types, which shoppers seemed to love. Soon growers were producing the reddest apples imaginable. Unfortunately, the dark skins were bitter and the flesh mealy. By the late 1990s, tasty imports began stealing market share and, driven by plummeting sales, U.S. growers mowed down acres of trees producing the worst Delicious fruit.

Yet despite such episodes, food science is here to stay; hybridization, after all, is almost as old as agriculture. Human tampering may have given us tasteless tomatoes, but it also gave us the Green Revolution, which introduced new varieties of wheat and other grains that dramatically increased yields and enabled millions of people in the Third World to avoid starvation. Food science has also given Americans some of the lowest food prices, as a percent of income, since Adam and Eve shopped for dinner in the Garden of Eden.

So the real message of the latest discovery about the tomato is that the path to better eating, for the great mass of the world's people, runs through the lab. Scientists have already used genetic engineering on sample tomatoes to turn back on the pro-flavor genes switched off by uniform ripening. Tasting experimental produce is barred, but researchers are pretty sure their handiwork has more flavor.

Of course, you can always limit yourself to locally grown seasonal produce. It's scrumptious, but not everyone can afford it. And you're not going to find much in this part of the country in February.

The market for organic heirloom tomatoes and the like will probably keep growing, which is great news for local farmers and those who seek their wares. But if scientists can make mass-market produce taste better, people might eat more fruits and vegetables, which can only improve their lives. Who'd want to throw tomatoes at that idea?