How Industrial Farming 'Destroyed' The Tasty Tomato
Wed 5 Oct 2011 8:59am
If you bite into a tomato between the months of October and June, chances are that tomato came from Florida. ...
But the tomatoes grown in Florida differ dramatically from the red garden varieties you might grow in your backyard. They're bred to be perfectly formed — so that they can make their way across the U.S. and onto your dinner table without cracking or breaking.
"For the last 50 or more years, tomato breeders have concentrated essentially on one thing and that is yield — they want plants that yield as many or as much as possible,...They also want those fruits to be able to stand up to being harvested, packed, artificially turned orange [with ethylene gas] and then shipped away and still be holding together in the supermarket a week or 10 days later."
Read the whole NPR story
here