Tasteless Tomatoes

New Jersey is the Garden State. One of my favorite summertime activities is walking down the street to the farmer's market and purchasing fresh and delicious produce, produce which almost always makes it into my meal as soon as I get home.

The Beginning of Our Tomato Garden in Rand Park

Since its very inception, genetic modification has been applied to food sources in designing a product that has a combination of the best qualities. Genetically modified tomatoes bruise less easily and can withstand longer travels, grow more uniformly and consistently than normal tomatoes, and have improved disease resistance. But why are the tomatoes I buy at the store so much bigger, but the ones at the farmers market taste better. Seriously, the ones I buy at the store taste like cardboard. To explore this, the difference between heirlooms, hybrids, and GMOs is essential to understanding.

Heirloom tomatoes got their name from the tactic of seed saving. Historically, farmers would save seeds and pass the seeds down from generation to generation, hence "heir." Seed saving, it seems, is not as easy at it might seem. The health of the "mother" plant, the maturity of the seed, and specific techniques that preserve fertility, and population size must be taken into account. Tomatoes are self-pollinating (they have both male and female reproductive organs) so an isolation distance must be implemented to ensure that cross pollination does not occur. Maintaining genetic diversity in heirlooms is incredibly important because the chances of mutations are increased if a farmer only saves seeds of a particular plant. Therefore, seed-savers must take care that negatively inherited traits are dispersed across a large population of saved plants. As farmers move away from the tactic of seed saving, genetic diversity of tomatoes has decreased, which can be dangerous in a population.

Heirloom Tomatoes Come in All Shapes And Sizes

So what are hybrid tomatoes? Come on, we know alllll about hybrids. (Thanks Mendel!) Hybrids have two different genetic parents. Hybridizers usually aren't thinking about taste when they're making their magic (hence why store-bought tomatoes are often bland), but rather factors like yields, uniformity, disease resistance, size, etc. Plus, you can't save these seeds and expect the yield to be the same. The next generation will have traits that will revert back to one of the genetic parents.

Now, onto GMOs, genetically modified organisms. GMOs have genetic material thats been altered using technology that can, like, do that. There are lots of crops that are GMO-ed, so to speak, including corn, soy, canola, and cotton. But, GMO tomatoes aren't quite as popular. There's a whole GMO debate that I won't get into, but altering plants genetics isn't a new phenomenon.

Given the choice between taste and all those other factors, I'm going to stick with taste. Thanks heirloom!