If you’ve ever bitten into a wild tomato, you’ll have enjoyed a sweet, intense explosion of flavour. The tomatoes that line most supermarket shelves are a world apart. They look great – a wall of even, ripe red – but they taste like cardboard. These two facts are related.
Ann Powell from the University of California, Davis has found that farmers have inadvertently ruined the taste of tomatoes by selecting for ones that ripen together and look good. That aesthetic appeal has been driven by a single change in a single gene, which also affects how the fruits taste.