I have the single best news to hit the grocery aisle since double coupons! The tomato. Yeah, you know, the tomato, right? You hardly want to buy one in a grocery store anymore. Unless you go for the pricey heirloom or hot house tomatoes, they taste like a watery tennis ball, amiright? You say tomato, I say to-meh-to. But scientists -- lovely food scientists -- have figured out how to put the taste back in the tomato. Ye food gods, it's about time!

You know how you walk into a store and you see the tomatoes you can afford, and they're all sort of a brownish, washed-out color? And they're hard? And when you eat them, they sort of taste like nothing? And then the expensive kind, the hot house and heirloom tomatoes, are bright red, bursting with color, they're soft to the touch, and when you taste them, you're like, "Ohhh, THAT'S what a tomato tastes like! I'd forgotten!" But they cost like $5 apiece?!

Wouldn't it be great if you could take the taste of the heirlooms and put it back into the cheaper variety? Yeah, it would. Well, scientists are working on that. But it's "complicated." Oh oh.

Says a plant molecular biologist (wow, what a job):

You can detect 400 volatile compounds in a tomato. People have speculated that maybe 20 are really important, and they need to be orchestrated properly. It’s a little more complicated than we like.

Hm, this is why I didn't pass chemistry. All I know is that I want to eat a real tomato again, and not pay three months salary for it! But the scientists believe they've finally extracted the taste of the good tomato, and can figure out how to "breed" it back into the mass produced cheap tomato. Somehow. And they are working with "big growers" to make this happen. But when??? Soon, they promise.

Ugh, this isn't sounding like it's going to happen tomorrow. But it's a start right? Maybe I need to try growing my own tomatoes again.

Do you like regular store-bought tomatoes?


Image via epsos.de/Flickr