My point is that gene-editing may breed "super", "awesome", "badass" tomatoes, but it can't breed tomatoes you really want to eat. So I doubt the article's premise very much.

Basically, my intuition is that you can't take a shortcut around the long time that it takes to develop good, tasty foodstuffs. For example, you can't hurry the production of good wine, you can't make olives mature overnight, or grow healthy animals in a day and you can't produce good varieties of vegetables in a few months of experiments. It takes literally generations of trial-and-error to get things right. And any effort to cheat time and speed-up processes ends up producing inferior products. This has always been the case, regardless of the technology- and the more recent advances, like CRISPR, only promise to speed things up, which is exactly what has steadily, constantly, failed until now with all the earlier technology that also promised to speed things up, only less so.

This is my intuition, anyway. I've eaten plenty of fast-food, mass-produced and cheap. I'm probably 50% pizza, 30% souvlaki and 10% burgers. But I know the difference between all that crap and the 20% that is my grandmothers' cooking (which was divine) and the local produce I eat every summer, when I go to the countryside. There is just no comparison between the crap that we eat out of convenience and the stuff that people eat when they have the time to grow it and cook it at leisure.

That must have something to do with the fact that figuring out what really tastes good is bloody hard, because taste (and fragrance) are such difficult senses to quantify. So even if science promises to make tomatoes feel tastier- well, the only measure of that is our own taste buds. And those cannot be relied upon, except over a very long timeframe, like generations- over generations, people choose the best varieties of grape that make the best wine; over generations, they pick the best varieties of fruit that have the most taste; the best vegetables, and so on. We won't succeed in reproducing that in a couple of years, no matter how much we science the shit out of it.