Fifteen years ago, in the middle of winter, Cathie Martin was impatiently waiting for her tomatoes to ripen. The John Innes Centre botanist already knew what was going to happen: Their green skin was about to turn a miraculous purple. She’d swapped out a few genes to supercharge their anthocyanin content—the same vibrant antioxidants that give blueberries and blackberries their rich color.
“I knew it’d work,” Martin says. “Well, as much as any scientist knows they will do something that will work. . . . It was really slow, and it took ages, and finally we could see this little bit of purple. It was great.”
Now, assuming the U.S. Department of Agriculture approves their sale in the coming weeks, Martin’s tomatoes could be available for the first time—as seeds you can grow or fruit you can buy at the store. But it’s also a significant moment to reframe the way we think about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in produce—not merely as a means to cut costs for Big Agriculture but as an opportunity to take an object that nature gave us and improve upon it, much as we would a smartphone or pair of sneakers.
Any tomato breed can be transformed into a purple tomato. And purple tomatoes taste exactly the same as their source varietal because anthocyanines are flavorless. But Martin’s research found two other interesting things. Her purple tomatoes—not to be mistaken with dark varietals like black cherry tomatoes—last roughly twice as long on the shelf as a standard tomato. And mice that ate a diet of her purple tomatoes lived 30% longer than those that ate the standard red variety. A human would need to eat the equivalent of two purple tomatoes every day to reach a similar potential benefit, yet Martin believes that’s actually more feasible than eating the alternative of two handfuls of blueberries a day. That’s because blueberries are expensive and highly seasonal, while her tomatoes could be cooked down into pasta or pizza sauce.
Read the complete article at www.fastcompany.com.