
Super-tomato shows what plant scientists can do - okket
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06915-y
======
coldtea
> _Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits
> farmers and sellers more than consumers_

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...](https://www.livescience.com/57647-why-store-tomatoes-are-
tasteless.html)

~~~
secure
> >Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits
> farmers and sellers more than consumers

> 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.

You’re saying the same thing as the article. Did you misread? :)

~~~
deialtrous
No he isn't. Breeding for crappy tomatoes has only gone on since the 1940s,
not for thousands of years. The thousands of years of breeding was for good
tomatoes, and the last 70 years or so has been ruining that thousands of years
of work.

~~~
fuzzfactor
>the last 70 years or so has been ruining that thousands of years of work.

Unfortunately this has happened to a lot more than just tomatoes or even
plants themselves.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Yes, well, I'm extremely suspicious of the "better tasting" claim in the
article- and the use of the over-the-top terminology is not doing much to
reassure me ("super" tomatoes! Rrriiight).

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.

~~~
sp332
Your comment kinda highlights the point of the exercise. Attempts to breed
shelf-stable varieties have accidentally bred out a lot of the flavor. But an
analysis of the genes involved shows that these qualities are not inextricably
linked. With the right tools, you _can_ make tomatoes physically tough enough
to ship well without sacrificing that tomato taste.

~~~
sametmax
You can't make void taste good. The problem of the tomatoes is not their
genetic material but the fact their environnement is empty of the things that
make them good.

You can create the most badass tomatoes you want, they can't create things out
of thin air.

------
kwhitefoot
> Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits
> farmers and sellers more than consumers.

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.

~~~
jessriedel
I don't understand. Domestication is defined by the significant genetic
changes induced by selective breeding. It's been practiced around the world,
long before the industrial and scientific revolutions. For instance, pre-
Colombian maize looks dramatically different than it's wild ancestor due to
thousands of years of selective breeding.

------
tomp
Where I see _really_ a lot potential for genetically-modified food, is in
space. There, the constraints are completely different, so it can be extremely
beneficial to be able to design your crops as you wish - control water usage,
respiration, growth patterns, flowering patterns, number and size of fruits,
etc.

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.

~~~
crististm
How do you know there are only extreme benefits?

To your second question I need to ask something: after you moved past the
coolness factor, what do you think would be the _drawbacks_?

~~~
tomp
I'm not saying there would be _only_ benefits, I'm just saying that the
tradeoffs are different... Earth-food _works_ , so GMO can either marginally
improve it, make it marginally worse, or make it _really_ worse (i.e. it's the
tail risk I'm worried about, same as with climate change). Space food is
currently _impossible_ , so almost anything we do will be neutral or an
improvement. Also, as I mentioned, the constraints are completely different -
up-front costs are mostly irrelevant, mass and speed of growth are the problem
- so foods that are net negative on Earth (e.g. because they have to be
produced in a lab and are hugely expensive) might be viable in space.

~~~
crististm
I'm amazed by your comment:

"I'm not saying there would be only benefits [in space]... ...Space food is
currently impossible,so almost anything we do will be neutral or an
improvement"

So in the first comment I read that there will be only benefits in space, and
in this one that there will be, practically speaking - only improvements?

~~~
tomp
Maybe I expressed myself poorly... I meant "using GMO can benefit/improve food
production in space [much more than on Earth]".

------
acomjean
There was a really good article awhile ago about gm potatoes that produced
there own Pesticides.

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...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-
garden.html)

------
moltar
Finally. I think many people in the west have never tasted a real tomatoe.
They’ll think it’s a completely new breed ))

~~~
dsr_
There are lots of heirloom tomato cultivars -- but they don't travel well, and
frequently look strange. They tend to be sold directly by farmers at slightly
premium prices.

In the last few years there has been commercial success with "new" varieties
of cherry-sized tomatoes, which carry a lot of flavor, are pretty, and travel
quite well.

------
John_KZ
>Europe’s outdated approach to gene editing.

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.

~~~
Gatsky
I don’t buy this. It is 100% guaranteed that these GMO tomatoes are safer than
alcohol and tobacco. Yet the ‘old and boring’ approach has deemed these
clearly poisonous substances safe, and allows billion dollar industries to
exist selling them. This is totally illogical.

~~~
tomp
What's the proof?

The article says:

 _> a cupboard full of genes with known effects, that can each be adjusted to
turn an unruly wild plant into a valuable domesticated one_

which I don't believe at all - if we really _knew_ exactly what genes do, we
could construct new life-forms artificially. But we don't biology is far too
complicated for us (for the time being). We don't even understand climate
(even the best models consistently overstated the predicted temperature rise).

~~~
Gatsky
You lack any sense of proportionality. Compare a theoretical and frankly
implausible risk of harm from a vegetable to an aerosolised highly addictive
carcinogen.

Which do you think deserves closer scrutiny?

The ‘life is too complex argument’ leads no where. There is far more genetic
experimentation going on in your gut bacteria as we speak than there ever will
be in a GMO tomato.

~~~
tomp
Yeah comparing GMO to smoking is a bit of a red herring... Like, who cares,
everybody knows that smoking is bad and driving is very risky, but these are
known risks, we _choose_ to do them. I'm comparing GMO tomatoes to non-GMO
tomatoes and frankly, I don't see that much potential benefit at all,
especially if you buy locally grown tomatoes (which already taste amazing).

------
buboard
the European Court of Justice has way too much power over way too many things.

~~~
yostrovs
Are hearings for new judges contentious?

~~~
buboard
there are no hearings, so they are not contentious

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crististm
I don't know anymore if Idiocracy is a movie or not. It's like I'm living a
bad dream where common sense is at a premium.

~~~
coldtea
Take for example the above content-less comment, which is all about signaling
superiority (but doesn't even bother to explain why).

~~~
crististm
On one level I'm experimenting with different type of inflammatory comments to
see how people respond. However, if you've seen the movie, you know that my
comment is not void.

On another level, I really think that subject at matter (genetically
modifications) is such that its full implications are impossible to correctly
predict on any scale you consider. Thus, it would be _wise_ for everyone to
play it safe and consider the fact that we are ignorant and don't know
everything.

Unfortunately people act like they do know everything and they also know the
future a million years from now. It's pointless to tell them that they are
willfully blind to any opposition so one recourse is caricature and irony.

Once in a while you'll stumble onto someone who asks you, how dare you tell me
that I'm stupid? Well, if you say you know everything, you are. They might
even get the point.

At least I'm stupid enough to know that I don't know everything.

~~~
coldtea
Well, that would be an argument if you have bothered made it. Taleb, for one,
has.

The reference is all wrong though. People in Idiocracy are just idiots -- the
simple kind. That's the very base of the money.

Whereas people doing "genetically modifications" while they might not know all
the implications of are not idiots, just smart people who commit hubris.

Different thing, different movie. Try "Jurassic Park" or "Frankenstein" for
your kind of message.

~~~
crististm
My bad, and you have a point. But I don't see much difference between idiots
that water plants with Gatorade and smarts that make it their business to save
the world from hunger (and they just know how to do it)

