Comment: Making tomatoes taste of something again Published on: 27 January 2017 Writing for The Conversation, a team from the School of Biology discuss how taste could be bred back into tomatoes. , ; , , and , If you shop in a supermarket you may well have asked why the fruit and veg you buy there is so tasteless, especially if you鈥檝e also tried homegrown alternatives. Traditional breeds of tomatoes usually grown in gardens, known as heirloom tomatoes, for example, are often small and strangely shaped and coloured but renowned for their delicious taste. Those in the supermarkets, meanwhile, are often pumped up in size but somewhat insipid to eat. This is because plants used by most tomato farms have gone through an intensive artificial selection process to breed fruit that are big, red and round 鈥� but at the expense of taste. Now a 20-strong international research team the chemical compounds responsible for the rich flavour of heirloom tomatoes and the genes that produce them. This information could provide a way for farmers to grow tomatoes that taste of something again. The unique flavour of a tomato is determined by specific airborne molecules called volatiles, which emanate from flavour chemicals in the fruit. By asking a panel of consumers to rate over a hundred varieties of tomato, the researchers identified 13 volatiles that play an important role in producing the most appealing flavours. They also found that these molecules were significantly reduced in modern tomato varieties compared to the heirloom ones. And they found that bigger tomatoes tended to have less sugar, another reason why large supermarket fruits often fail to inspire. Tomatoes from the Andean region of South America and belong to the Solanaceae family, making them relatively close relations of potatoes and peppers. The original, ancestral tomato was very small, more like a pea, showing just how much human intervention has swollen the fruit. We don鈥檛 know how long they have been grown for human consumption but they had reached an advanced stage of domestication by the 15th century when they were taken to Europe. Before the 20th century, tomato varieties were commonly developed in families and small communities (which 鈥�). With the industrialisation of farming, the began with intensive selection for fruit size and shelf life. Some has been put into improving the flavour of tomatoes through breeding. But the new research appears to indicate that this has ultimately been unsuccessful and that earlier breeding efforts have doomed modern commercial varieties to mediocrity. Family heirlooms. Shutterstock The new paper, , emphasises what seems to be a constant conflict between the food industry鈥檚 desire for profit and what the public actually want. The researchers tactfully excuse the way tomatoes have been bred for size and shelf-life at the expense of taste as being down to breeders鈥� inability to analyse the fruit鈥檚 chemical composition and find the right volatiles. But many people will find this hard to swallow. After all, the new research itself used the most ancient volatile analysis system there is: the human taster. It wouldn鈥檛 have taken much for farmers to incorporate taste trials into their breeding programmes. Because modern farmed tomatoes have only lost their flavour in the last hundred years or so and varieties are still available that produce the tasty volatiles, it should be possible to reinsert the crucial taste genes back into commercial varieties. This could be done by genetic modification or conventional breeding. Just as we are seeing a resurgence in , it would be great to see a new generation of tomato breeders interested in returning flavour to the fruit using wild and heirloom varieties, while maintaining other commercially desirable traits. There is significant to the idea of genetically modifying foods by inserting genes into a plant鈥檚 DNA in the lab. But the idea of reinserting lost genes to the public than introducing completely new ones. Either way, it shows how perverse the food industry鈥檚 methods are that we may need to use one of the world鈥檚 most advanced technologies to give an inherently delicious food some flavour. , Lecturer in Ecology, Evolution and Computational Biology, ; , PhD candidate, , and , PhD candidate, This article was originally published on . Read the . Latest News Comment: An expert explains what happened in Nepal Writing for The Conversation, Professor Stuart Dunning discusses how a collapsing glacier turned into a lethal wall of mud and water. published on: 28 August 2026 Comment: Britain鈥檚 quarter century Writing for The Conversation, Professor Hayley Fowler discusses how the UK environment has changed in the past 25 years. published on: 27 August 2026 缅北禁地 academic receives esteemed mid-career Fellowship A 缅北禁地 researcher has been awarded an esteemed Fellowship by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). published on: 21 August 2026 Facts and figures
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