How science ruined tomatoes

If it doesn't go rotten it was never fresh! 

In this dystopian age of fake news the latest attack (reported in the New York Times) by a Florida plant breeder on the supermarket tomato is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

Plant breeders have been deceiving us since the 1960s with picture perfect hybrid tomatoes that never ripen. We gardeners once joked about an heirloom tomato called Never Will (ripen) — never ever imagining that its genes would become the basis of the hybrid supermarket tomato that could bounce off the floor.

I was astounded when I found a multinational seed merchant's catalogue in the 1980s showing their latest hybrid tomato (pictured above) placed under a rock to illustrate, not its flavour or food value, but its extraordinary toughness.

The first Genetically Modified laboratory tomato was launched to much fanfare in 1994, brazenly called Flavr Savr, not because it passed any taste test, as its name indicated, but because it had a shelf life of more than 4 weeks. Shopper disgust was so fierce, its withdrawal was forced from shops before its first fruit could even go rotten.

So instead of wrinkling and ripening with age, as all good healthy food does, it was the ‘Hollywood ageless beauty’ version of food.

Deceived shoppers have awarded the supermarket tomato with “the highest dissatisfaction rating of any vegetable”.

The Diggers Club, which pioneered the rescue of heirloom tomatoes in Australia, have been conducting taste tests for over 20 years, and every year the supermarket tomato has always rated last, in every public test.

So since the original tomato, that we now call an heirloom tomato, has all the flavour that's missing from the multinational breeding, you might ask why do we need to breed these genes back from the original forms that all of us gardeners and farmers have been growing for more than hundreds of years?

Haven't these US scientists ever been outside their laboratories to a farmers’ market, an heirloom festival or a Californian restaurant?

Surely we just choose from the thousands of heirloom cultivars that evolved in the public domain, before hybrids became a device to wrest ownership and control from an unsuspecting consumer.

After all, heirlooms are part of our cultural history.

The original fruit that arrived in Europe from the Andes was Pomodoro, and it was yellow, but Italians selected out the yellow colour in favour of red tomatoes for pastes or salads, which launched a whole cuisine.

Can you imagine a pasta or pizza without tomatoes?

Now is there any reason that we need to take the lousy hybrid tomato and, like Cinderella, turn it into something desirable? Well, it’s that bottom-line again.

Heirloom tomatoes are part of the public domain and not owned by any corporations, so previously growers could choose from thousands of heirloom cultivars.

The switch to hybrid seed forced growers from saving their own seed, because hybrids in the second generation aren't true to type.

The price of hybrid seed escalated over 20 years of corporate control from about $500 a kilo to $450,000 a kilo for glass house production hybrids.

Let's get to the honest truth.

Not content with control, about 95 % of the tomato market multinationals are now competing with tiny seed companies, like ourselves, who have made inroads with vastly tastier heirlooms, because of shopper dissatisfaction.

Now there is no biological advantage in hybridising tomatoes because being a self-pollinating crop, there is no hybrid vigour, so falling multinational sales and profits are what's driving this bleat from laboratory scientists.

For thousands of years our food supply was ours, but with the advent of hybridisation and seed patenting from GE crops, corporate ownership sees just six companies control about 68% of our seed driven food supply.

Public domain tomatoes and other food crops (not Monsanto's or Syngenta's corporatised seeds) are a major contributor to our food heritage, our diet and our health.

Our food heritage and health is under threat when controlled by US multinational seed corporations because of their preference for processed food over fresh food, which has led to the disappearance of the local green grocer, the baker, and the butcher, as food has been corporatised, advertised and warehoused.

So today, for the first time in US history, Americans are facing a reduced lifespan.

Clive Blazey (2017)