a minuscule number of tomato varieties available to shoppers, and a diminishing amount of nutrients in fresh tomatoes (with the exception of the rising amount of fat and sodium). These tomatoes look wonderful–big, bright red, perfectly round, unblemished, as uniform as if they’d been turned out with cookie-cutters. Yet they are tough and rubbery, and at least to my own purely subjective taste, comparatively flavorless.
How did this come to pass?
The answer is, by deliberate selection. The huge, multinational corporations that dominate the continental food industry, from seed to supermarket shelf, prefer it this way.
After days of searching and phone calls, I located several industry spokesmen and scientific experts on tomato breeding, including specialists in fresh market varieties and others focused on the process market. I spoke to some of them for a half hour or more, while the tape cassette turned, asking for detailed descriptions of the characteristics that made the top 15 tomato varieties such a success in their respective markets.
As one scientist said, “the first characteristic is yield, the second is yield, and the third is yield.” He was, of course, being facetious.
According to the scientists, the characteristics that make a tomato variety a hit in the fresh market category include, in order of importance:
1. yield (in pounds per acre)
2. large size (200-250 grams)
3. firmness, in terms of thickness and hardness of the outer pericarp wall (which provides the ability to withstand pressure and between 25,000 and 50,000 pounds of weight when bouncing along in a truck during shipment)
4. resistance to disease
5. heat tolerance (in setting fruit during Florida’s warm weather)
6. uniformity of shape
7. uniformity in time of ripening (color)
I asked one expert if any other characteristics were desirable. He paused for a moment to think, then concluded: “no, you’ve got quite a bit of it.”
Processing tomato experts had a somewhat different list. In California, the top characteristics were:
1. yield (in pounds per acre)
2. viscosity or thickness (which governs how much of a product can be made from a pound of the given tomato’s paste)
3. amount of soluble and insoluble solids in the fruit
4. firmness (ability to withstand rough handling during mechanical harvesting)
5. uniformity of color
6. disease resistance
7. heat and cold tolerance (so as to continue producing at the early and late ends of the season)
I also asked these experts if any other characteristics were important, if we’d left any out. “No,” said one. “It does get to be end product-driven.”
No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavor and nutritional content. These were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning.
For the modern, corporate food industry—whose needs these university horticulturists’ research serves—how a food item tastes and whether or not it is nourishing for human beings appear not to be issues. They aren’t even discussed.
A quick survey of various websites where university horticultural researchers report the results of field trials of plant varieties gave the same result. There were reports of trials at a number of universities, mostly in the south and midwest. The typical list of qualities tested for in fresh market tomatoes included “yield, earliness, fruit size, fruit resistance to cracking, firmness, acidity, and plant tolerance/resistance to diseases.”18 Flavor and nutritional value were almost never mentioned.
From every indication, if a tomato variety were developed that was perfectly uniform in shape and size, that grew fast in both heat and cold, that ripened at exactly the same moment every season, that had an outer layer as tough as brake lining, and that yielded massive amounts per acre–but which had no flavor whatsoever, and absolutely no nutritional value–the industry would likely welcome it like the Second Coming of Christ. And consumers, you and I, would be expected to buy the things or just bloody well go hungry.
Of course, even if we bought them and ate them, we would still be “going hungry,” because we’d have received very little nutrition.
But hey, that’s capitalism, eh?
As for flavor, I wasn’t just imagining that the fresh market supermarket tomatoes I’d bought were less tasty than those I’d eaten in Italy, or taken from my home garden years ago. According to the textbook Economic Botany: Plants in Our World:
Tomatoes to be sold as fresh grocery store produce are picked before they are mature or when they are only beginning to turn colorful and then are ripened at the time of selling. Fruits that have been picked green are tough because of a lack of the proper ethylene-generated maturation, or they are mushy because the intercellular matrix deteriorates. They also lack the sugar that accumulates very rapidly at the peak of ripening when tomatoes are left on the vine....Ethylene [is] a plant hormone that is responsible for the series of events that lead to the final color change, softening, and flavor production characteristic of natural ripening. 19
So, not only were my store tomatoes deliberately bred to be tough to withstand the bouncing of long range transport, they were rendered still tougher by picking them when green. Tough and tasteless.
By “ripened at the time of selling,” the textbook was referring to the practice of artificially gassing the green tomatoes with ethylene during or just after transport in special “ripening rooms.” This gives them a suddenly red color, making them look good on the shelf, but doesn’t appear to have the same effect as natural ripening in terms of producing flavor and texture.
Refrigeration during transport has an even more negative effect. According to a USDA Agricultural Research Service study of the effects of refrigeration on tomato flavor, “chilling the fruit reduced ripe aroma, sweetness, and general tomato flavor, while increasing sourness and reducing sweetness. This was supported by measured changes in aroma compounds, sugars, and acids.”20
Those little red tennis balls had begun to educate me. They had also begun to really annoy me. I wanted to know more about the system that was doing this. I wasn’t about to take it lying down.
Neither should you. And you don’t have to. There are alternatives, which we will discuss in later chapters, after some of the other aspects of our modern, corporate North American food system have been described.
THE DECLINE OF THE TOMATO ISN’T THE ONLY tragic story in the modern supermarket, nor are the USDA’s nutrient tables the only source documenting what’s happening. A tour through the recent literature
