Sicilian Rouge High GABA is a special type of tomato designed to contain high levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) (氨基丁酸), an amino acid believed to aid relaxation and help lower blood pressure.

Tokyo-based startup Sanatech Seed Company teamed up with scientists at the University of Tsukuba to develop a new variety of tomatoes using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Named Sicilian Rouge High GABA, this new type of tomato contains five to six times the normal level of a type of amino acid called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. According to Japanese media, the company removed an inhibitory domain (抑制域) within the tomato’s genome to enable it to produce these high levels of GABA.

According to Shimpei Takeshita, President of Sanatech Seed and Chief Innovation Officer of Pioneer EcoScience, the exclusive distributor of the tomato, the company was given permission to commercialize the genetically changed Sicilian Rouge High GABA variety last December, and contract farmers who have been growing them ever since. Now, the tomatoes are ready to hit store shelves.

“At first, we got mixed reactions to genome- edited foods, and we thought it would be difficult to bring them to market as they’re not fully understood by consumers,” Tatsuo Takeshita, chair of Sanatech Seed told NHK. “But the tomatoes earned a good name from those who took part in the trials.”

A Japanese health ministry committee gave Sanatech Seed permission to commercialize the new tomato variety. They provided notification and the startup plans to ship each package of tomatoes with a sticker that says “improved using genome-editing technology”.

Unlike genetically modified foods, genome-edited plant varieties are considered just as safe as varieties improved using traditional methods because no outside gene is introduced during the process.

Sanatech Seed has already started accepting online orders for Sicilian Rouge High GABA tomatoes. A 3-kilogram box of tomatoes will reportedly cost 7,500 yen. That’s a lot of money for tomatoes.

Pickled (腌制的) vegetables, fish and meat preserved in salt, and bread baked in a circle with a hole in the middle (e.g. bagels), were once the foods for the poor of all backgrounds in central and eastern Europe. But it was Jewish immigrants (犹太移民) who brought these recipes to the West, particularly to America, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bagels and pickled foods became mainstays of Jewish deli (熟食店) cuisine,which are the subject of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society called “I’ll Have What She’s Having”. The exhibition implicitly (含蓄地) asks whether a cuisine that has been enjoyed by millions and helped define the taste of New York City continues to be lively today.

There is a distinctly sad tone to it. Though some foods exist over several decades, the number of Jewish delis in America has dropped sharply. Black-and-white pictures of long-gone people eating at long-gone places line the exhibition’s walls. After all, the Jewish deli is a product of a bygone era,shaped by immigration, discrimination and inner-city life. As immigrants’ children fit in with the locals and moved away, the deli became one of many dining choices — less a center of communal Jewish life and more a pleasant place to occasionally chat and talk about the past.

Meanwhile, deli food itself has crossed its limits. For a while, McDonald’s in Germany offered a “Grilled Texas Bagel”. That is a senseless phrase to a deli expert: a decent bagel belongs nowhere near a grill and has nothing to do with Texas. But it suggests that bagels — like pizza, hot dogs and other foods once only consumed by particular ethnicities — now come across less as specifically Jewish than as broadly American.

The most hopeful part of the exhibit is at the end: a case of menus from modern delis across the country. They were founded by young Jewish chefs determined to keep their culinary (烹饪的) traditions alive — not because discrimination left them no other way out, but because the food is delicious, inspiring, and an irreplaceable part of America’s culinary landscape.

Why bother cooking? You don’t have time, of course (or you think you don’t); that’s the big reason. But you also don’t do it as well as the professionals, so just let them handle it for you. Or at least let them give you a head start in the form of meal-assembly shops(食品组装店)and canned, frozen and pre-chopped ingredients. Michael Pollan thinks you should bother. His latest book, Cooked, is a powerful argument for a return to home cooking.

Scores of food writers and editors, myself included, have long mourned for the increase of companies on the public’s diet. We have seen the slow retreat(撤退)from the kitchen as primary contributor to America’s obesity and other health and environmental problems. But perhaps only Pollan can so effectively pick up the clues of so many food movements, philosophies and research papers and turn them into a persuasive narrative with a clear message. He writes, “The best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in our lives is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

Don’t challenge him. Because of the power of his writing, Cooked may prove to be just as influential as Pollan’s other book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, possibly the single most-quoted text by those caring about how our eating choices affect the planet.

As in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan knows that his reliability depends on a willingness to practice what he urges, so in Cooked he takes just as much of a hands-on approach as he suggests his readers do. He divides the book into four sections: in this case, the classical elements of fire, water, air and earth. Each represents a type of cooking—barbecue, braising(炖), bread baking and fermentation—and, as the book’s subtitle promises, explores cooking as no less than a transformation of nature into food and drink.