Why Tomatoes Kept In Fridge Lose Their Flavour?

The tomato hitching a ride home in your grocery bag today is not the tomato it used to be. No matter if you bought plum, cherry or heirloom. If you wanted the tastiest tomato, you should have picked it yourself and eaten it immediately. That’s because a tomato’s flavor – made up of sugars, acids and chemicals called volatiles – degrades as soon as it’s picked from the vine. There’s only one thing you can do now: Keep it out of the fridge. Researchers at the University of Florida have found in a study, published on 17 October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that when tomatoes are stored at the temperature kept in most refrigerators, irreversible genetic changes take place that erases some of their flavours forever. Researchers took two varieties of tomatoes – an heirloom and a more common modern variety – and stored them at 41 degree Fahrenheit before letting them recover at room temperature (68 degrees Fahrenheit). When they looked at what happened inside the tomatoes in old temperatures, the subtropical fruit went into shock, producing especially damaging changes after a week of storage. After they were allowed to warm up, even for a day, some genes in the tomatoes that created its flavor volatiles had turned off and stayed off. Most of the tomatoes we eat are plucked from their vines just as they start to ripen. They are sorted, sized, graded and packed into a box with other tomatoes. Then they stay in humidity and temperature controlled room (no less than 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and ingest ethylene, a gas to make them ripen, for two to four days before being transported to a warehouse. There they are repackaged, re-sorted and shipped to your grocer. There, if demand is low or if there’s no room, they may be stored in a fridge, and by the time you get them, it’s been a week to ten days.

Meat Eating Is Driving 300 Wild Mammal Species Into Extinction

Some 300 wild mammal species in Asia, Africa and Latin America are being driven to extinction by humanity’s voracious appetite for bush meat, according to a world first assessment released on 19 October. The species at risk range from rats to rhinoceros, and include docile, ant-eating pangolins as well as flesh ripping big cats. The findings published in the journal ‘Royal Society Open Science’, are evidence of a “global crisis” for warm blooded land animals, 15 top conservation scientists concluded. Terrestrial mammals are experiencing a massive collapse in their population sizes and geographical ranges around the world. This decline was part of a larger trend known as a “mass extinction event”, only the sixth time in half a billion years that Earth’s species are dying out at more than 1,000 times the usual rate. Besides eating them, humans are robbing mammals of their natural habitats through agriculture and urbanization, and decimating them through pollution, disease and climate change. According to the Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of endangered species, a quarter of 4,556 land mammals assessed are on the road to annihilation. For 301 of these threatened species, “hunting by humans” – mainly for food, but also as purported health and virility boosters, and trophies such as horns or pelts – is the main threat, according to the comprehensive review of scientific literature.