Here is a fun exercise for you after a long absence…

First, you have to go out and get a pile of jelly belly candies. Those are the squishy sugar-coated disks that come in fruity flavors. Forget the lemon and cherry and grab either a blue or a red (blueberry or raspberry).

Ready?

Ok, now open the package but — whatever you do — don’t smell the candy!

Plug your nose, take a bite, chew and swallow. Keep that nose plugged!

Now, take another bite, chew, and release your nose.

Pow! What should hit you is a powerful sweet taste. The reason is that a good amount of the sweet we taste comes  not from sugar on the tongue but from the volatiles, the compounds that take to the air and give the candy its smell. These go in through the nose and throat when you chew and Bam! How sweet it is.

I learned this at the AAAS Annual Meeting, which this year is in Boston. The talk was about “Building a Better Tomato,” which is right up The Blind Pig alley.

There is an enormous amount of research going into building a better tomato. Linda Bartoshuk, from the University of Florida, Gainsville, figured out that there are certain volatiles in tomatoes that make them taste sweeter, even if the varietal has low levels of sugar, or less sweet even if the tomato has more sugar.

This information is being used to tease out the flavor components that will make a good supermarket tomato. In the past, flavor was ignored and we ended up with those bland pale tomatoes that ship well and grow in abundance an last an eternity on the shelf, but taste like crunchy water.

The new promise is that someday soon, we’ll be able to get Heirloom taste without having to go to the farm stand and pay $5 per pound and without having our very expensive tomato rot in the bag on the way home from the market. And all of this with a lot of science and a little good breeding. (I missed the beginning of the talk because I hit traffic on the Pike on my way to the Riverside T station, but I’m pretty sure this talk did not mention GMOs.)

So I for one am kind of looking forward to these tomatoes. Nothing is better than going to the farm stand and buying a pile of ugly tomatoes and eating them whole because they are so amazingly good, but here in New England, that lasts for about one month, maybe two. I’d love to not have to eat canned tomatoes the other 10 months of the year just to have something that tastes like a tomato.

Next on the schedule for today? Optogenetics. That’s where they genetically engineer brain cells to make them controllable with light. It’s being used right now to turn neurons on and off in mice to understand how habits form and what causes neuropsychiatric disease. It’s brilliant but diabolical, as so many brilliant things are.