When my wife and I go shopping for fresh food in the open market, she usually smells the produce. I am bolder and ask the vendor to let me taste it, if possible.

In supermarkets, tasting fruit and vegetables is not allowed — and is even weird — so we simply avoid buying products we know aren’t great, for example apples from Poland or tomatoes from Turkey. They have no taste, with all due respect.

Moldovan apples and Italian tomatoes, on the other hand, enjoy the highest reputation in our family. Since we usually have all meals at home, choosing the right produce in central to our cuisine.

Trying to figure out what happened to the taste of fruit and particularly to tomatoes (yes, biologically it is fruit), I searched for answers.

Here’s what I learned.

Worldwide, rare tomatoes on supermarket shelves delight customers with flavor and sweetness today and no one knew exactly why their great taste began fading a few decades ago. The matter has been taken seriously by a team of researchers at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, a division of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

In November 2024, they published a paper in the journal Nature on how to improve the tomato flavor genetically — and in parallel they answered why the delicious taste of tomatoes was lost down the road.

The Chinese researchers also figured out how to return the old-days taste of tomatoes.

The trouble with tomatoes took a bittersweet turn in the age of industrial agriculture, according to an older study. Farmers, under the pressure of feeding a rapidly growing population, prioritized quantity over quality. Tomato varieties were carefully selected for their ability to withstand long journeys and mechanical harvesting, rather than for their taste.

Sweet pea currant tomatoes are making their way into consumer preference charges, thanks to their flavor. Credit: public domain

Those new tomatoes, firm and uniform in appearance, could travel hundreds of miles without bruising. They ripened all at the same time and were harvested altogether. But in the process, they lost their essence — the complex flavors that once defined them.

The root of the problem lay in the plant’s biology. Scientists discovered that the genes responsible for sweetness and aroma had been unintentionally sacrificed. The two most crucial molecules for flavor — glucose and fructose — had dwindled, leaving behind bland and watery fruits, the findings published in the journal Science showed in 2017.

The culprit was a single mutation in the tomato’s genome, one that boosted yield but at the expense of taste.

After years of study, the researchers working at Shenzhen discovered that two genes, long overlooked, played a pivotal role in suppressing the natural sugars in tomatoes. These genes produced proteins that acted like brakes, destroying an enzyme called sugar synthase (SuSy), which was crucial for synthesizing sugars and converting plant energy into sweetness.

With the help of CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing technology, the scientists silenced these genes. The modified tomatoes accrued 30% more sugar, restoring the vibrant taste of their ancestors.

As a result, the flavor improved significantly. By introducing this mutation into the genome, it is possible to enhance tomatoes of almost any variety, and this can be done relatively easily using existing technologies. Unlike the genetically modified crops of the past, these new tomatoes carried no foreign DNA, making them more palatable to a public wary of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Large red cherry tomatoes are known for better taste than most known varieties. Credit: public domain

Interestingly, the top spots in the tomato ranking are booked by little-known local varieties from Peru, often without even having their own names, and clearly untouched by the efforts of modern agronomists. The best-tasting “tomatoes” weren’t actually tomato at all but rather a related species — Solanum pimpinellifolium, also known as the currant tomato.

This plant produces significantly smaller fruits (even smaller than cherry tomatoes), which indeed resemble red currants in appearance. Today, many enthusiasts grow currant tomatoes and the commercially cultivated varieties differ little from their wild counterparts. As a result, the species is typically considered a wild rather than a domesticated plant.

The secret of Solanum pimpinellifolium’s great taste is that currant tomatoes are cultivated without scientific meddling and require manual handling by human laborers.

According to the authors, the technique they employed during experiments on tomatoes can be applied to apples, peers, cucumbers, pepper, and many other fruit and vegetables — there are no technological impediments.

And yet, the newly-modified tomatoes aren’t making an easy journey into supermarkets as the scientists expect regulatory hurdles, public distrust, and the inertia of industrial farming. Would these new tomatoes, born of cutting-edge science, find their place on store shelves? Or would they join the long list of promising innovations crushed by fear and misunderstanding?

Too much science spoiled the tomatoes; but it can also reverse the process if given a chance.