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Wild tomatoes are small and unpleasant tasting, doesn't that kinda blow the premise? The modern tomatoes we eat are genetically modified by humans through bree

• lutorm 11y ago
  We have twisted nature for thousands of years to have higher yields and more desirable characteristics Undoubtedly. However, those desirable characteristics were about more than just yield. In industrial agriculture, however, you can't quantify "taste". You can, however, quantify "yield". So it becomes a case of ruthlessly optimizing for what you can measure, to the detriment of other, more subtle, characteristics.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    You can quantify taste. Not precisely, sure, but taste testers are used in commercial food production.
    • dasil003 11y ago
      Sure, for flavor engineering, but do they do it for raw produce? A big part of the problem is that produce is seen as a commodity, and all the economic value is added by using cheap commodity ingredients in a highly tuned industrial process to create the most tasty and addictive food. The incentives are just all misaligned.
      • TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        > Sure, for flavor engineering, but do they do it for raw produce? They do it for QC samples of mass produced food. Perhaps it could be done for raw produce, then?
  • SigmundA 11y ago
    I don't disagree, the lag time for the market to respond to flavor is obviously much higher than something easily measurable like yield. However the solutions seem to revolve around going back to "natural" methods which are anything but, rather than simply making more genetic modifications to get the desired trait or perhaps needing more or different fertilizer. The option is there to utilize the land less efficiently to get the same effect for some characteristics, but we may have to accept at some point feeding people on a modern scale may not be tenable with what is considered more "natural" or "organic" or whatever term is being used to ambiguously describe the techniques that are not natural at all in the dictionary sense.
• TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Yeah, we can make plants do whatever we want, we just have had the wrong priorities.
• jrochkind1 11y ago
  I don't blame the techniques, I blame how we've chosen to use them. If we chose to use modern techniques to make tomatoes as delicious and nutricious as possible, I have no doubt we'd have some damn delicious and damn nutritious (both at once!) tomatoes. But they wouldn't ship or store well and wouldn't have as high a yield, so they'd be more expensive, at least under the current production and distribution economy. So we've chosen to use those modern techniques to make tomatoes that store well, ship well, have a high yield, taste like crap, and have fewer nutrients.
  • semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    One word (well, 5): hermetic, peeled San Marzano tomatoes. Sure, they aren't fresh tomatoes. But they're super tasty, nutritious, store and ship well, and they're fairly cheap to boot. Try making a proper bolognese (proper, as in, start with frying up sofritto) using cans of San Marzano... O.M.G. Conserved vegetables are awesome. Conserving even helps increasing the nutrient value by increasing bioavailability.
    • jschwartzi 11y ago
      The cool thing about these is they don't have calcium chloride in them so they properly fall apart when you cook them.
    • tiglionabbit 11y ago
      It's common knowledge among cooks that canned tomatoes are better than fresh ones.
• sharkjacobs 11y ago
  Tomatoes in the 1950s were already domesticated. Humans have been growing tomatoes since at least 500BC. Comparing them with wild tomatoes is irrelevant. Industrial agriculture has brought about a radical increase in food yield over the last century, and there seems to be a corresponding, possibly correlated decrease in the nutrition.
• SixSigma 11y ago
  If you grow your own tomatoes they taste amazing. Also, to get the best sugar content, the thing to do is to leave them on the vine once ready and stop watering them, the stress causes the plant to dump its energy into the fruits. They will taste better but if done commercially it extends the time to market and reduces shelf life. When you grow your own vegetables you realise how low quality most of the ones in the supermarket are. And what a restricted set of choices there is.
  • mirekrusin 11y ago
    This is very true, I remember taste of tomatoes grown by my grandpa 15-20 years ago, it's almost a different veggie. Same with strawberries I remember eating from bushes as a kid, didn't taste or look like the ones in the shop. Cherries on the other hand are pretty good. Maybe because they grow on trees, which have much longer lifetime and therefore are harder to optimize for yield. Also seeing couple of cherry "farms" made me think it's a good idea - instead of pesticides, genetic modifications, in-house cultivation or whatever - they use gigantic mesh to protect them from unwanted animals and I think that's it. I don't know if it's a common practice or just few exceptions I've seen.
    • Nihilartikel 11y ago
      I have to voice disagreement on cherries. I grew up near a park with a ready supply of wild cherry trees, which I gorged myself on many a summer - compared to a big Bing cherry they have a really concentrated flavor and a juicer, less firm meat that would bruise pretty easily in shipment. I at least like them much more
• noam87 11y ago
  It's a shame that so many people fall for the trope of the anti-science hippie when it comes to criticism of modern farming. Believe it or not, most of us who criticize industrialized farming techniques are not tinfoil-hat antivaxers, and understand very well what you describe. Thing is, there's no reason why modern techniques can't be used to produce foods that are more varied, nutritious and flavourful. Instead we're getting bland produce, all the same two or three varieties, and increasingly devoid of any nutritional value because our backwards practices are destroying the very soil we use (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and...). It's like in terms of food, we're moving towards an "everybody wears a silver onesie" future... scientific progress doesn't have to mean monotony. In fact it's not progress. It's laziness on an industrial scale, and it's costing us our health (and one of life's greatest pleasures: food with real friggen flavour). So many of us have never tasted a real vegetable or piece of meat. (Ironically, in poorer, less industrialized countries like in South America, the meat is absolutely delicious -- visited last year with some friends; it was like they had never tasted meat before. Then I realised... they really hadn't!) For a glimpse into what is possible using modern techniques, while still embracing flavour and variety, I highly recommend the Chef's Table episode on Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. I believe it's the second episode of the first season (available on NetFlix right now... the whole series is worth watching really).
  • maerF0x0 11y ago
    Its no surprise, most people pay by the lb. If there was some way to price by nutrition maybe people would optimize that way. Eg: 20c per 1000mg Vit C .
    • tiglionabbit 11y ago
      Some words and standards can indicate quality. "Pasture Eggs" for example, are more expensive but also a better product. Also, going to a farmer's market and buying from producers directly instead of a supermarket is one way to shop for quality. I wouldn't want to use nutritionism as the definition of quality, because so far nutritionism has been too reductionist to capture the full picture. There's a wide variety of micronutrients that turn out to be useful, but are easily depleted from the soil in a monoculture. Are you getting your Vitamin K12? Selenium? Zinc? Copper? Choline? Are the animals you eat getting theirs?
• ThomPete 11y ago
  This has nothing to do with techniques. This has to do with what those techniques are used to create. For instance. The difference in taste between a tomato I get in my already overpriced but well stocked supermarket here in NY and the tomato I pick up from a local farmer nearby is night and day. One of them can litterally stand on it's own the other is bland and tasteless. They cost around the same. The problem become when optimization get higher priorities than the result of the optimization. I am well aware that there are many reasons why we don't want 100% organic farming unless we can do it at scale like conventional farming, but currently the difference in taste is night and day and if you care about that then it's a big deal and techniques can be used to fix it.
• fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  >caused a mutation to make them more bland, this occurred in the 1940's before Then why do so many people alive today complain about the taste and texture, since most ought not even know what a pre-1940 tomato tastes like? >I always think it ironic to blame modern techniques Blame the abuse of selective breeding and genetic modification.
• krick 11y ago
  You are mixing terms, resulting in pretty cheap rhetoric. If I tame wolves and chose their mating partners — it's breeding. Same with crops. It's not what people call "genetic modification". If I cherry-pick genes of one organism, attach them to a virus and infect other organisms with that: now that's what is called genetic modification. I won't argue which is better, it seems like a hot topic for some people. But I can completely understand how somebody is OK with the first one and not so much with the second. It's like a difference between choosing an engineer to construct your house, and making your own modifications to the final construction project. You have to be completely sure you know what you are doing to do the latter. Some people doubt we actually know what we are doing. Sometimes looking back it's hard to blame them.
  • hibikir 11y ago
    And what happens when you irradiate the tomatoes, hoping for the DNA to change in ways that help? Using today's legislation, if the modification happened like that, the result is not considered GMO. That, along with completely random mutation, leave to novel genetics all the time. So when we do it ourselves, we don't know what we are doing, but when we let randomness perform larger modifications, then we are 100% ok with it, and you can buy the output as certified organic. If all the plants we ate had tightly controlled genetics, I'd understand the argument, but in practice, the most genetically consistent vegetables you can buy come from big agribusiness.
  • collyw 11y ago
    I personally don't see that much difference which is why I challenge anti GM people with the question: why do you see targeted gene mutation as being more dangerous / worse than random gene mutation? Still waiting for a decent response to that.
    • krick 11y ago
      Again, I don't want to take sides, as this "anti GM"/"pro GM" seems to be ridiculously religious matter in the USA, but since you asked, I guess I can answer. The difference is, basically, that random mutations happen all the time since life on Earth has begun, they are relatively subtle, and, last, but not the least — unavoidable whether you like the fact that they happen or not. They are pretty close to definition of "normal", because that's just how carbon-based lifeforms (or, probably, any theoretically possible lifeforms at all) work. The result of any individual mutation might be not pleasant: child might be born defective or ugly, but that's… well, "natural". People tend to avoid unusual, so even though some ugly chicken with two peckers and one eye might be completely healthy food — many will think it's disgusting and won't eat it. And, as I said, random mutations cause relatively subtle changes in phenotype, so it would take many, many generations for such chickens to become normal even if we selectively breed them to have two peckers. Even single such mutation is something pretty unlikely without strong external influence, like high radiation or some chemicals. And if specie changes a lot during multiple generations — it becomes normal. If they survived through so many generations, and we still eat them: it somehow "works", one might think. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, didn't happen for a couple of billions years until last century, is very much avoidable and immensely powerful. Consider making a pig glow through selective breading. Seems pretty unlikely, yeah? Well, it's simple now, if you tinker some with genome of a pig and a jellyfish. And that's just an illustration: possibilities of what you can produce are nearly unlimited. I don't want to quote Spiderman's uncle here, but I guess you get the point. One might not even actually think glowing pig is dangerous, but it's certainly suspicious. Which is more than sufficient reason to beware of something or to want to avoid it. The best thing about living nature is that something, that can seem completely safe and uninteresting at first, might be a cause for something much bigger than it seemed. Like, you know, bringing a couple of rabbits to Australia[1]. As a side note, you should probably remember when arguing with those "anti GM" friends of yours, that thinking of something as dangerous isn't the only reason why somebody might not like something. Say, they might happen to not like green wallpapers — it doesn't necessarily mean they think green wallpapers are dangerous. They just don't want them, maybe for religious reasons or whatever. So if everyone suddenly starts producing only green wallpapers because it's simply cheaper, and any other colors become rare, ridiculously overpriced and are treated by sellers as a luxury product — they can become "anti-grean-wallpaper" very easily. In attempt to bring balance to the force, if nothing more. Add to that that not everyone is perfectly rational — which is kinda ok as well — and there can be infinite number of reasons why somebody might be anti-something. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia