The Case for Healthier Tomatoes By Caroline Schneider MS’11
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SUMMER 2019
A
T SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE, YOU’VE probably gone to class knowing you left an assignment unfinished. The knot in your stomach grew as homework was collected. And, as you practically crawled under your desk to avoid the teacher’s gaze, a ridiculous, clichéd excuse may have flitted through your mind: “The dog ate my homework.” For a team of researchers in the Department of Plant Pathology, the destroyed assignment was a plot of test tomatoes in northern Florida. But they didn’t need to devise a hungry canine. For them, the villain was a swarm of voracious whiteflies. And then came not one, but two howling hurricanes.