Wooden box filled with fresh vine ripened heirloom tomatoes Shutterstock / Teri Virbickis
Yellow, streaked or purple, enormous or tiny, round, plum or lobed – the colours, sizes and shapes of the tomato varieties traditionally grown in Europe vary greatly. But it turns out this diversity is only skin deep. Apart from the few genes controlling these obvious characteristics, these tomatoes are virtually identical genetically.
“It’s like a desert with some oases of variety,” says Jose Blanca at Valencia Polytechnic University in Spain. “The tomatoes that you find in the supermarket nowadays, they have more diversity than the traditional…
