The Grocery Store Tomato Problem

Most of you have never grown a tomato, and that’s okay. Growing food is becoming a lost practice. But what that means is that most, if not many people have no idea that what a tomato is supposed to be.

Somewhere in the middle of the last century, commercial tomato breeders started harvesting them for something called uniform ripening.

A naturally grown tomato doesn’t turn red all at once. It gets these dark green shoulders that fade unevenly, they’re sometimes deformed and unattractive to the eye of mass consumers. Something like that is horrible for farmers trying to pick thousands of tomatoes efficiently. And as a consumer, I understand. Millions of pounds of food turned down every single day, all due to customers wanting perfect looking fruit.

So farmers started breeding out as much of the imperfections as they could. Selected for a mutation that made the whole fruit turn an even light green before going uniformly red. Its easier that way, easier to harvest, to sort… and it looked better on the store shelf.