Super-tomato shows what plant scientists can do

Actually it's the opposite.

Modern breeding and other technical alterations has reduced tomatoes to a BS fruit that suits farmers and sellers (longer lasting, more colorful, more resistant, bigger) than consumers.

Tomatoes have lost a large percentage of their sugar content and flavor in the last 60 or so years for commercial reasons:

(...) the researchers also wanted to determine why store-bought tomatoes are so tasteless — i.e., "water bombs." It turns out that modern tomato cultivars are selected for qualities such as size, because consumers prefer large fruit, and firmness, because that trait makes tomatoes easier to ship, the researchers said. Meanwhile, the quality of flavor has been overlooked, the investigators said. We found that modern commercial varieties contain significantly lower amounts of many of these important flavor chemicals than older varieties [do]," the researchers said in the study.

https://www.livescience.com/57647-why-store-tomatoes-are-tas...

To begin with, there is no need to edit wild varieties to produce tasty tomatoes. The varities we have already are actually pretty damn good already. It's the production and distribution methods that suck out all the taste and purpose out of their miserable, sour existence.

For example, when I'm back home in Greece for the summer, I eat tomatoes that taste of tomato and smell of tomato. They are usually grown by people, normally grocers, in their gardens, in small numbers (though not necessarily using organic means, if you were wondering). The grocers who grow them then sell them in their stores, so you can find maybe a kilo of home-grown fruit in a grocery store every other week or so, and often only in the summer (because the grocers seldom have greenhouses). Note that this is only true in the countryside- in the cities, like Athens, the quality is much more bland.

Like in Athens, the tomatoes I eat in the UK, where I live and work, are boring, tasteless and miserable and they leave behind a lingering sensation of disappointment and nostalgia of a faraway sunny land. As I understand it, these commercial varieties are actually grown in Southern Europe (including Greece) in vast greenhouses, from where they are picked when they're still green and then allowed to "mature" (basically, slowly they rot) during transportation in fridge trucks. These tomatoes have been abused to the point of PTSD and it shows when you put them in your mouth: they are empty and devoid of all taste, fragrance and meaning and can drive a sane eater to depression.

So forget about mass-producing and mass-distributing decent-tasting tomatoes. You can mass-produce tomatoes that satisfy the farmers, with characteristics that make them profitable to sell; and you can mass-produce tomatoes that the majority of consumers will accept, mournfully, but only because they seldom have the chance to buy and eat good ones, and have probably even forgotten what tomatoes actualy taste like.

But you can't mass-produce good tomatoes.

Tomatoes were only brought to Europe a few hundred years ago. I very much doubt that there was much serious breeding before that.

And there are loads that taste good, the supermarkets simply won't stock them because they make less money.

Another thing I was thinking about - not related to GMO, but I'll throw it out in case anyone from HN knows more about it - would it be possible to control plants using hormones? E.g. to manually "order" the plant to stop growing leaves and start growing fruits, or to grow in a particular direction (this could probably be done with light as well) or pattern, etc.

The author grows some (there is a end user agreement that software people should be familiar with)

The trouble was figuring out who would regulate these new crops (in the US anyway). In the end McDonald’s wouldn’t buy them so I think that potatoe is gone. It’s a long read but it talks about how modern farming vs organic and a whole host of issues that are still relevant today .

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...

Right, I can't wait to follow the latest trends on gene editing. Our approach is so old and boring, we should be trying the new fun and shiny stuff, like having some guy edit the genes of our staple foods while providing no guarantees whatsoever.

For those who aren't aware what this is article is about, it's about US farming lobbies being unable to export their genetically modified food crops to the EU.

While GMOs can be exported to Europe, they must pass through a careful set of tests by the EFSA (european food safety authority), including appropriate labeling, and the various EU countries can still choose to ban them under their authority.

As Trump said recently, he will be pushing the EU to accept all of the untested GMO crops his sponsors grow, and he'll probably be pushing for a forced, EU-wide directive to just take everything and shut up.