The other day, I had a dismaying experience while making my usual frugal lunch. Usually, a cheese sandwich does me. Two slices bread, salted butter, thick bits of the maturest cheddar Ocado has to offer, and a grind of salt and pepper: a lunch fit for a king. But even kings like to change things up a bit from time to time. Custom has an established track record of staling things.

So when I spotted, lurking at the bottom of the crisper, a solitary tomato, blemishless and an inviting deep red in colour, I thought: what the hell, you only live once. A cheese and tomato sandwich it would be, and hang the expense. But long story short, or short story shorter, this beautiful looking tomato – despite being one of the supposedly fancy ones that arrives with a twig or two of greenery still attached – was a complete dud. It ruined my lunch and very nearly put me off my afternoon nap.

This tomato would have done service as a test match cricket ball. Indeed, if the cricket ball had swapped in for the tomato reciprocally, it would have been an improvement in the sandwich. It probably would have tasted more tomatoey, too. That this alleged tomato was fridge-cold was my fault. That it tasted of nothing whatsoever, I think, was not. It was the fault of, like, capitalism, yeah?

The outer skin was as tough and unyielding as pigskin. On slicing, the seeds debouched in a watery greenish gloop. And the flesh between the disappointing exterior and the disappointing interior was no more than a cellulose storage matrix for some slightly acidic water. Reader, being a man or woman of the world, you will I daresay have come across such tomatoes yourself.

And it is this tomato that came immediately to mind when I read a headline yesterday announcing: ‘Gene edited superfruits that last for weeks heading for our shelves.’ Yup: Frankenfoods, as we called them in the late 1990s when GMOs seemed like something that might be high up the list of things worth worrying about, are back. This time the advance of Enlightenment science is promising bananas that don’t go brown after you cut them and ‘strawberries that last for weeks’. What a time to be alive!

Now that we’re free of the dead hand of Brussels, legislation is already on its way through parliament to make it possible for these whizzy innovations to find their way to the shelves of our local Budgens. This slightly boosterish report told us that scientists say the proposed rules ‘will allow British consumers to benefit from tastier, healthier food with a lower environmental impact’. To which I say, respectfully: cobblers.

I went on at such length about my disappointing sandwich not out of self-pity, or not only out of self-pity, but because my grossly suboptimal tomato is, I think, a bellwether. That tomato – like the pristine yellow-green banana that is chalky and astringent inside, the cucumber that turns out to be a cylindrical stick of water, the strawberry the size of a baby’s fist that tastes of nothing, the rock-hard peach that quietly undergoes a phase change from inedibly woody to mouldy in the fruitbowl without once passing through ‘edible’ – is a concrete (really) symbol of where we are now with food production.

Generations of selective breeding under pressure from the effective monopsony of the big supermarkets has given us these things. Supermarkets want produce that can be shipped with maximum ease and minimum damage in transit, that retains water as effectively as possible so it weighs more, that will last on the shelf for weeks without starting to get manky, and that will look delicious to the browser’s eye. That means, of course, produce that is rock-hard on the outside and tastes of water on the inside.

The supermarket’s interests are not the same as the consumer’s: the things that make fruit big and indestructible and maximally profitable for supermarkets are not the same things that make it nice to eat. It is why practically every strawberry you can easily get your hands on these days will be one of those big, tasteless Elsantas – the worst things to come out of the Netherlands since William of Orange.

Opening the door to GMOs of this sort will, we can be confident, simply supercharge what used to be accomplished through selective breeding. It took about half a century for our fruit to get as crap as it is now (I remember my late father moaning about tomatoes in the 1980s), but gene editing technology will be able to achieve similar levels of crappification in a matter of weeks. I see no objection to gene-editing technology per se, and it’s merely superstitious to decry it as an affront to the natural order of things. The problem isn’t the technology: it’s what the technology is going to be used to select for. The biotech companies who are working on these products know where the payday is, and the payday is everything to do with shelf-life and size and visual perfection and nothing to do with taste.

Why do we need strawberries that last for weeks? Why do we need, for goodness sake, bananas that don’t go brown when you slice them? (Okay – banoffee pie… fair point; that’s what lemon juice is for.) Why can’t we genetically modify, rather, strawberries to taste of bloody strawberry, and bananas to taste of banana?  Or, for that matter, tomatoes to taste of tomato.