If you want to re-live that delicious tomato flavor again,
head to a farmers' market when they're in season.
“I’m 98 percent
confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better,” Professor
Harry Klee recently exulted to The New York Times.
Hmmm. Excuse me,
professor, but “substantially better” than what? One of Momma Nature’s own
heirloom varieties perhaps? No, no — Klee knows that tomato-tampering
flavorologists like him can’t get near that quality.
Rather, he’s merely
out to endow the industrial, massed-produced fruits of agribusiness with enough
tomato-y taste to pass as a minimally acceptable version of the real thing.
How? By artificially injecting them with some flavor genes from actual tomatoes. Why? So the corporate powers can retake market share and profits they’ve been losing to small producers of the natural product.
Where did this guy
come from? Monsanto, where he was employed for 11 years to help bring
dangerously-untested-and-unlabeled bioengineered food to market. Now at the
University of Florida’s Institute for Plant Innovation, backed by Monsanto,
Klee leads the effort to innovate what’s called “a chemical recipe for the
ideal tomato.”
That mission raises
another question: “Ideal” for whom? It’ll still be a bland, mass-produced
tomato doused with pesticides, machine harvested while green, and shipped
across country. It’s only ideal for the maximization of corporate profits.
And beware, for the
tomato isn’t the only target of this academic-industrial complex. Klee &
Company are also re-doing the blueberry to be, as the Times called
it, “crispy, almost apple-like.” Wow, I’ll bet that next they’ll manufacture
apples to be almost blueberry-like.
Why are the public’s
scarce research dollars being frittered away on these absurd corporate
projects?
Klee claims that it’s
all about “bringing back flavor.” But professor, flavor never left. Go to a
farmers market and taste for yourself.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the
populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org