10/31/06 The Purple Tomato

The Purple tomato. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. A few years back, the Heinz company experimented with changing the color of an American staple. They marketed Green Ketchup. It tasted the same as the red stuff but the idea aimed at the Nickelodeon kid market never caught on. My son just wasn't interested in anything green at the time. Now Jim Myers, Professor of Vegetable Breeding and Genetics at Oregon State University is toying with a purple tomato. The first question that came to mind was, why? MYERS: Why purple tomatoes. Well what got us interested in this whole area was the potential health benefits because these purple compounds have properties that are similar to what you find in blueberries and some other fruits and vegetables that provide nutritional benefits in those crops. The purple color is caused by a chemical called an anthocyanin the same class of health-promoting pigment found in red wine. MYERS: These have all been shown that in populations that eat fairly high levels of these compounds you see reduced incidents of heart disease and reduced incidents of certain cancers. According to Myers, the purple tomato has certain anti-microbial properties. MYERS: We've actually seen this in the field with our fruit. We discovered this by taking pictures out there. We'd have a pile of purple tomatoes beside a pile of normal red tomatoes, take a picture, walk away and come back a month later and the fruit's still sitting there of the purple tomatoes looking pretty decent and the red fruit is all turned to mush. The purple tomatoes taste just like a normal red tomato. But Myers says the purple color is only skin deep. MYERS: People are interested in, can you make purple juice or purple puree; I'm not sure whether you can do that. You can certainly make a tomato product that you could claim has these anthocyanins in it and have greater health benefits even if it doesn't have the purple color to it. So when you make a puree or a juice the color tends to disappear or you don't see a strong influence from the purple color. Purple tomatoes are at this point more of a novelty and are still a couple of years away from being marketable. MYERS: No, they're not on the market. We're about 2 years away from having a stabilized line. We're doing a little bit of limited trialing at this point in anticipation. These are all potential markets because it's a complete unknown. I'd say the response from home gardeners is that they would love to have something like this, just as a novelty. And I'd see cherry tomatoes and slicers being important. I think there is this whole area to explore with the processing market. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.