The Hightower Report: A Tomato Tale That's Hard to Stomach

"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, mass-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 foods 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 is not the only target of this academic-industrial complex. Klee & company are also redoing 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 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.

For more information on Jim Hightower's work – and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, "The Hightower Lowdown" – visit www.jimhightower.com. You can hear his radio commentaries on KOOP Radio 91.7FM, weekdays at 10:58am and 12:58pm.