A UF researcher is working to make tomatoes great again.
Harry Klee, a UF horticultural sciences professor, and a team of researchers from China, Israel and Spain have found a way to restore tomatoes’ flavor. About 60 to 70 years ago, farmers began breeding tomatoes for quantity rather than quality, resulting in the fruit’s state today.
He said older tomato plants had an average of three or four fruits on the vine. Modern varieties now have about 15 to 20 fruits.
“They’re really not paid to deliver something that’s flavorful,” Klee said. “They basically have neglected flavor, because it’s not important to the farmer.”
Klee said they’re pushing modern tomatoes to taste more like the richer, older varieties. The researchers identified which flavor motives made tomatoes great to eat and used breeding to incorporate them into modern varieties.
They used natural genetic experiments to change the plants’ flavors and not its genetics, Klee said.
He estimates the tomatoes will be sold in supermarkets in about three years. He said he doesn’t know how the tastier fruit will affect prices but hopes more people will eat them.
“The goal of all of this is to make healthy foods taste better, so people will eat more of them,” Klee said.
Balasubramani Rathinasabapathi, a UF commercial vegetable production professor, said his students worked with the tomato plants in his class.
“Different students actually evaluated them for taste and evaluated them for yield, and we were pretty impressed,” Rathinasabapathi said.
Tomatoes are the students’ favorite crop to grow, he added.
“The newer tomatoes are also exciting to do because they yielded well, they performed nicely,” Rathinasabapathi said. “And the flavor is really great.”
