Scientists Discover That Tomatoes Taste Bad And Are Working On It

Over decades, researchers, farmers, and scientists have bred tomatoes to be larger, more robust, resistant to disease, and taste bad.  But they didn't realize they were making them taste bad until recently when scientists discovered that during the breeding process, they were accidentally removing a gene that is used in giving tomatoes flavor.

Scientists recently discovered that a gene which gives wild tomatoes their flavor has been bred out of 93% of commercial tomatoes.  Woops.  It turns out that over the many years of cross-breeding tomatoes, cultivators have accidentally turned their tomatoes into bland, nasty fruits.

There is some good news to this whole nasty tomato problem.  Now that we know that tomatoes aren't actually supposed to taste this bad, we can fix the problem.  Cultivators are now actively trying to breed the flavor gene back into commercial tomatoes and soon tomatoes won't taste so horrible.

You can read the actual research paper, published by Nature Genetics, here.