Tomatoes
Tomatoes
Do you ever get tomatoes from the grocery store and wonder why they don’t seem to have much flavor? There’s a very good explanation. Many farmers from the past few decades have sacrificed flavor in an effort to maximize their yields.
One 2017 study out of Spain published in the journal Science sequenced the genomes of almost 400 varieties of tomatoes, identifying the compounds that give a tomato its flavor.
“The flavor got lost because people didn’t know what the molecular and genetic bases were, so they couldn’t apply them,” one of the study’s co-authors, Antonio Granell, told the Guardian. “It was because they focused on quantity, productivity, and resistance. What we’ve discovered is that they basically lost these volatile compounds that we’ve identified in this study.”
