It shouldn’t surprise anyone that George Will keeps repeating his half truths to deny the degraded state of the climate, but what exactly Scientific American was thinking with this article about how heirloom tomatoes are “hardly diverse and are no more “natural” than grocery-store varieties” is a mystery to me. Except that sacred cows make the best hamburger, maybe.
Open pollinated tomatoes are definitely more diverse than their hybrid descendants thanks to traits bred for or discovered over generations (the 10 extra special genes mentioned right in the article itself), and having been developed this way via selective breeding rather than hybridizing technologies, they are, in fact, more natural than the rest.
Sigh.
