Tomatoes

Tomato season is not now. Tomatoes abound in the stores, though; some have come from places where tomato season is more or less now. Some come from the parallel world of hydroponics, greenhouses, the red legal cousin to all that marijuana similarly grown.

I recently went shopping and asked the produce maven about the tomatoes in winter. She took me around and introduced me to four kinds: "This beefsteak is ok but flavorless; these romas are ok for cooking, but eating not so much. This Mexican organic is not quite there. Try these cluster tomatoes, they're as close as you can get right now." So I bought them and sliced them up and put them on my burger, right off the grill, and they tasted pretty close.

Apropos of tomatoes as a kind of technology, I was reading Carroll W. Purcell's book The Machine in America, and was reminded of the trajectory, so to speak, of this scarlet sphere. The years after World War 2 saw the rise of the mechanical pickers, including the cotton picker and the tomato picker. The war had raised the cost of tomatoes and of labor; in 1949 G C Hanna of UC Davis had figured out how to "mechanize" the tomato: "if he could not invent a machine to pick the tomato, he would invent a tomato that could be picked by machine." But sales were not strong until the end of the Bracero program (and its federal importation of Mexican nationals as laborers) in 1964, and the beginning of Cesar Chavez's UFW in 1965. Within two years, 80% of the tomato crop was mechanized.

My favorite part of this sad story is the notion that making tomatoes pickable, that is, green and later-ripening (and at one point square, though this was a deal killer for consumers), also meant "inadvertently" breeding the taste out of them. So the fruit wasn't sweet anymore, and wasn't red anymore. Instead, the tasteless but easily picked fruit had large amounts of sugar and salt added. And color? Purcell documents the chemical company that reddened the tomatoes while in storage. Their motto?

"Etheral helps Nature do what Nature does naturally."

David Halbertam, in his nonfiction book The Fifties, talks about the application of industrial methods to all sorts of things in the 50s: housing (Levittowns), food (McDonalds), and so on. And the application of industrial processes to agriculture "rationalized" farming: large holdings were more profitable, labor costs were reduced and jobs eliminated, and every tomato was mixed with the oil it took to run the machines and make the fertilizer.

What do I think of all this?

I'd like to throw a tomato at G C Hanna, preferably one of his green tasteless ones. They're harder.

Oh and one more thing. Today I heard a story on NPR about slavery in the fields in Florida. And the crops included? Tomatoes.

See these articles:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2009/02/27/the-tomato-you-eat-this-winter-may-have-been-picked-by-slave-labor/

and

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes?currentPage=1