10
Genetically modified purple tomatoes get green light to be sold in Australia
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
10 points (91.7% liked)
Australia
4828 readers
182 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You'd think they'd use GM to make them be healthier, last longer, or taste better...
Nope, we get a slightly different color.
From the article
I should have read the article, but the change is just pigments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthocyanin
They're pumping up the sugar content, that's the only change besides color, no health benefits:
So yeah, the people who sell it said it was engineered for health and nutrition, but it's just blue and pumped full of extra sugar bro
Thanks for looking into it. I was being lazy.
I'm gonna start a nasty rumour about purple tomatoes.
A friend and I caught the end of a news broadcast one night in the early naughts. We both thought we heard the presenter announce the death of Peter Garrett. Before long we'd informed lots of friends of Garret's passing. Disturbingly, the rumour starting coming back to us from people we hadn't told. It was years before I heard a thing about Garrett and found out he was alive.
That's the kind of rumour I'm going to spread about purple tomatoes.
I mean, you don't need to spread rumours...
Anthocyanin isn't FDA approved as a food additive, so this company bioengineered it to have more "naturally" to get around FDA regulations to pump a fruit full of something no evidence shows has a health benefit and is just cranking up the sugar content.
There's absolutely no reason to make shit up, and using science would be more effective.
The target demographic they're going after by marketing it as a health food are going to be interested to find out it's actually more unhealthy than normal tomatoes.
OK OK you win. I just wanted to tell my Garrett story.
That's literally also why beets are red. They originally were white. Then someone accidentally grew some that turned red. They thought that was the coolest shit ever, and now beets are mostly red.