It may be a superfood, but how does Purple Tomato taste?

Every year dozens of new tomato varieties are introduced to gardeners, each with characteristics that are touted as being better than other tomatoes. The distinction from existing varieties is often minute, but this year there’s a new tomato that is truly different from all the others. It’s a GMO tomato that is available to home gardeners.

In fact, it’s the first GMO food crop available to home gardeners, period.

Called, somewhat underwhelmingly, just “Purple Tomato,” it is an indeterminant variety that produces deep purple fruit in about 70 days.

The color isn’t just a novelty, it’s actually the whole point. This tomato is packed with anthocyanins — antioxidants with health benefits that are also found in blueberries, blackberries and eggplant. Since people eat more tomatoes than berries, the goal was to create a tomato that was just as healthy.

Purple Tomato was developed by Cathie Martin, a professor of plant sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and it is only available in the United States, where it has completed a biotechnology regulatory process with the USDA, FDA and EPA.

Martin created the tomato, which she’s been working on for more than 15 years, by using the DNA from an edible purple snapdragon flower.

In addition to creating a nutritionally supercharged tomato, Martin and Norfolk Healthy Produce, the California-based company that is bringing the tomato to consumers, are hoping to reframe the public’s perception of GMO crops.

And that could be an uphill battle. While some GMO crops were developed to save a species from viruses or, in the case of golden rice, have more nutrition to aid in food shortages, others were modified to tolerate herbicides, and it is the latter reason that most people know about.

The Purple Tomato isn’t the first cherry tomato with an anthocyanin-produced purple hue. In 2011, a traditionally bred tomato called Indigo Rose was developed by Oregon State University. I can personally attest to it being a tomato that you grow more for looks than for taste.

Descriptions of the taste of Purple Tomato, which has much more anthrocynin than Indigo Rose, range from a vague “deep tomato taste” to the confusing “crisp sour components with a nice level of sweetness.”

The only place to buy the seeds, which are an astonishing $20 for 10 seeds, is from Norfolk Healthy Produce’s website, but you can save seeds from this year’s crop.

  There’s a chance they may mingle with other tomato varieties in your garden. Tomatoes don’t cross-pollinate easily, but it does happen, so Purple Tomato could become a parent of a seed saved from another tomato variety.

Purple Tomato is sure to get a lot of hype this year, and I’ll be growing it to see if it comes close to living up to it.

While I’ll be happy about its superfood antioxidants and those beautiful purple tomatoes, at the end of the day, the real test will be its taste. Because if scientists can use groundbreaking technology to make an exceptionally healthy tomato, they can certainly figure out a way to make it delicious too.