Attack of the supermodel tomatoes

When my family told people that we were moving from our urban Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn to Los Angeles, our family and friends were thrilled. My mother had been mugged three times while living in New York City, and everyone told us how wonderful it would be to live in California, the nation's breadbasket.

Within months after we arrived, we had water under our carpets due to floods in the San Fernando Valley. We were evacuated from school during the L.A. riots in 1991. There were also the fires in Malibu and the earthquake, breaking all or our dishes and shaking my treasured fish from the tank they swam in. And the produce! It turns out that the tomatoes in the supermarket were like supermodels: they looked great but didn't have much substance. They did not taste good. It took me years to figure out that the trick was to buy produce from local fruit stands practicing organic growing practices.

Tomatoes have been bred largely for resistance to pathogens and for their ability to survive harsh shipping practices and not for flavor. Traditionally, the approach to breeding had been to select superior phenotypes that popped up as rare variants in natural populations and then to propagate these over the years. I remember wondering when I first learned about Mendel's infamous experiments: how is it possible to develop pure lines? Self-pollinating plants, such as many crop plants, tend to be homozygous. This makes the process easier. However, breeders are forced to rely on favorable natural combinations of genes.

The recent advent of genetically modified organisms raises new issues.