Why supermarket tomatoes don’t taste the same anymore

Have you noticed that supermarket tomatoes these days don’t really taste as good as they used to? Today’s Video of the Day explains why. The clip comes from thanks to our favorite American Chemical Society Reactions series.

The trouble dates back to the 1990s, when vegetable breeders found a way to make a tomato produce less of the hormone ethylene. This way, each tomato would stay hard and tough during the shipping process, and then finally ripen while sitting in the store.

Meanwhile, a mutation in the gene that produces chloroplasts also made tomatoes bigger and redder. But these benefits came at a cost: the altered tomatoes began to lack the same great taste.

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By Rory Arnold, Earth.com Staff Writer

Source: American Chemical Society