In my childhood memories, in the evening of summer, my mother would always cut tomatoes into slices and sprinkle sugar on them, sweet and sour, very refreshing, but now many people complain that tomatoes are getting more and more difficult to eat.
But now many people complain that tomatoes are getting harder to eat, what is going on?
Tomatoes, also known as tomatoes, are native to South America, but at first they were introduced by various countries as ornamental plants because they were too brightly colored.
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The reason is also that the original tomato is indeed toxic, the toxicity is also relatively strong, the toxin is mainly distributed on the leaves are also immature fruit, but the ripe fruit is non-toxic, coupled with generation after generation of cultivation, the alkaline poison of tomatoes has long been eliminated.
Although everyone can now eat with confidence, the tomatoes are getting more and more difficult to eat, and the overall taste is not as good as before.
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At first, this problem did not attract everyone's attention, but in 2017, the scientific research team led by Huang Sanwen, a chinese scientist, published an academic article in the American journal Science, showing the reasons for the lack of tomato flavor through data, which also proved that consumers' feelings are correct.
Therefore, Huang Sanwen's research team spent 4 years to study it, through the formation of a tasting team of 170 people, 100 kinds of tomatoes for many rigorous tasting experiments, and foreign scientific research teams, a systematic analysis of the flavor of nearly 400 kinds of tomato varieties, and finally found that the flavor difference of tomatoes is mainly due to the loss of some gene loci.
Image source: Hong Kong Commercial Daily Network
The flavor substance of tomatoes is a chemical substance that floats into the human nasal cavity when the fruit is cut or bitten open, and the scientific name is also called a compound of coriander, which affects the overall flavor of the tomato.
Another reason is because of the development of modern cities, people are getting farther and farther away from the farmland, a tomato from picking to the table often takes several days, and now in order for the tomato not to be broken, complete on the shelves, but also specially developed a new variety, that is, thick skin, less juice.
If like the previous thin-skinned tomatoes, the last consumer purchase is incomplete, which also greatly reduces the consumer's purchase demand, so in order to allow consumers to buy, you can only make the tomatoes look big, red, and full, so choose to be in the state of the tomatoes are not ripe, it has been picked and loaded, that is, when the tomatoes are still green, they will be picked, and in the process of storage and transportation, the tomatoes will slowly turn red.
However, such a maturation process affects the conversion of starch to sugar. About 80% of the sugar in tomato fruits comes from the leaves, which are transferred to the fruit at a later stage, and early picking will affect the formation of sugar, so the taste will also be affected.
In addition, the use of chemical fertilizers will also affect the taste of tomatoes. Potassium is an important chemical element that affects the taste of tomatoes, but in China, the use rate of nitrogen fertilizer is much higher than that of potassium fertilizer, because nitrogen fertilizer has a faster effect.
In China, the ratio of nitrogen and potassium fertilizer use is 1 to 0.2, while in Japan, the ratio is 1 to 1 or even 1 to 2. In fact, not only tomatoes, many fruits look bright, but they have no taste or poor taste, all because of the excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Even in order to enter the market faster, some ripening agents, color enhancers, shoddy filling, and finally transported to the market, these factors will greatly change the original taste of tomatoes.
Although the taste of grown tomatoes is poor, the nutritional value is still rich, and for the problem of pesticides and hormones, everyone can rest assured that as long as the tomatoes purchased through normal channels have undergone strict safety testing, they will basically not have any impact on health.