[gwern]

The overseas tomatoes don't ship or grow any better, and consumers are demonstrably unwilling to pay for them. The point of this research is that by doing the expensive rare difficult phenotyping & genotyping of flavor of all the varieties they used (domestic commercial, heirloom, even wild), you can get a polygenic score which predicts flavor without having to grow & feed to a taste panel; and with this polygenic score, you can then do molecular breeding piggybacking on top of normal breeding, to neutralize the damage. For the most part, there's no inherent biological reason that a robust fast-growing tomato has to taste bad because the taste chemicals represent such a physically minute part of the tomatoes; it's just that with zero selection for taste, the taste gradually suffers over generations.