21 Jul This is the perfect tomato, not coming to a supermarket near you
Tomato lovers, rejoice, for science has achieved the impossible: the perfect supermarket tomato. Why won’t it ever hit the supermarket shelves? Slate investigates….
The Garden Gem won’t bruise during shipping, it resists many of the major diseases that regularly decimate tomato crops, and it is a flesh-producing powerhouse, turning out up to 22 pounds of tomatoes per plant, which is as productive as the best modern cultivars.
But there is one aspect in which the Garden Gem is very different from every other supermarket tomato: flavour. It actually has it. Lots. More than 500 sensory panelists at the University of Florida have declared it among the very best tomatoes they have tested.
Tomato lovers, stop rejoicing. Because you will not find the perfect supermarket tomato in any supermarket. Not now, and perhaps not ever.
It’s not because the Garden Gem is a GMO — it was bred the same way tomatoes have been bred for thousands of years. It’s not because some multinational owns the patent and won’t release it in the US (which, unfortunately, is the case with a superb British potato called the Mayan Gold).
It’s because Big Tomato doesn’t care about flavour. Tomato farmers don’t care. Tomato packers don’t care. And supermarkets don’t care. When it comes to flavour, the tomato industry is broken. And not even the Garden Gem appears able to fix it.
The story of the Garden Gem begins in 1989, when a scientist named Harry Klee was tasked by Monsanto to use GMO technology to produce a slow-ripening tomato. The hope was that if tomatoes could be picked almost ripe, instead of green, they would be luscious and delicious by the time they made it to store shelves.
The experiment was a resounding success — Klee’s GMO tomato took three times longer to ripen. But it was an even bigger failure, because the slow-ripening tomato didn’t taste a whole lot better than most supermarket tomatoes. It turned out a tomato’s flavour problem went much deeper than simply being picked green.
Searching for tomato greatness
And so, in 1995, Klee joined the horticultural science department at the University of Florida to dedicate himself to cracking the mystery of tomato greatness. Over the next 20 years, he would grow more than 400 varieties of heirloom tomatoes and have them rated by hundreds of sensory panelists, who answered a 63-question survey designed by Klee’s colleague Linda Bartoshuk, the psychophysicist best known for her discovery of supertasters.
The questionnaire posed standard queries about sweetness, sourness, and flavour intensity, rated on a scale from 1 to 9. But it also asked panelists to rate “the strongest liking of any kind you’ve experienced,” “the most intense annoyance you’ve ever experienced,” and “the most amused you have ever been by an anecdote.”
By relating the tomato scores to these unrelated benchmark experiences of pleasure and dislike, Bartoshuk was able to generate tomato ratings that could be compared across different years. Klee, meanwhile, analyzed the tomatoes in a gas chromatograph — a machine capable of measuring minute quantities of flavour compounds. Klee hoped that by scrutinising the flavour chemistry of the best-tasting tomatoes, he could figure out which compounds made tomatoes delicious.
Klee may have learned more about humans than tomatoes. In 2005, he and cell physiologist Steve Goff discovered that the flavours people most love in tomatoes are all synthesised from important nutrients, such as essential amino acids, carotenoids, and omega-3 fats — suggesting a deep and as yet misunderstood relationship between flavour and nutrition.
More recently, Klee and Bartoshuk learned that these nutrient-indicating flavour compounds can make tomatoes taste sweet independent of sugar content.
But Klee’s most important accomplishment may well be a tomato he first plucked in the early months of 2011. To create it, Klee took the best-tasting tomato he’d ever grown — the Maglia Rosa, a grape tomato that tastes extraordinary but, like so many heirlooms, is very hard to grow—and crossed it with a commercial powerhouse called Fla. 8059, which grows superbly but tastes like tap water.
He was aiming for a compromise — a tomato that grew well and tasted good. What he got shocked him. Like its commercial parent, Klee’s new tomato boasted excellent shelf life, disease resistance, and productivity. But by some miracle, it tasted so good that its flavour scores were statistically identical to its heirloom parent. Klee dubbed his miracle fruit the Garden Gem.
The rest of the story, you would think, would go something like this: Supermarkets clamour for exclusive rights to sell the Garden Gem. Growers from Florida to California to New Jersey engage in a historic bidding war for Garden Gem seeds. And consumers at last experience the fantasy of walking into a supermarket and buying tomatoes that cause tears of joy to slide down their cheeks as the juice slides down their chins.
Here’s what actually happened…..
Slate: Read the full article