This Saturday, from 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. the Chico Community Environmental Gardens will be holding a Tomato Taste-Off, where the public is invited to sample almost 50 different varieties of tomatoes of all shapes, sizes, colors, flavors, and textures. The event will take place at the Community Garden on Silver Dollar Way, across the street from Costco off of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway.
I used to think I had a pretty good understanding of the tomato world. There were cherries, grapes, romas, slicers, dicers, and squishers. I knew six varieties!—I thought I was doing quite well. Then I moved to Chico, where tomatoes apparently are a passion, and where their pulpy goodness seems to grow not on cute little plants, but in veritable backyard jungles dotted with soft-ball sized spheres of orange, green, purple, yellow, and red fruits. Then came last week’s Tomato Contests at the Farmer’s Market, and now 50 varieties are going to be available for sampling at the Community Garden. Clearly I needed a tomato re-education. So I did some research, and was amazed to learn how the world of supermarkets and big business has limited my culinary experience, as well as blinded me to the ecological value of vegetable diversity.
It turns out that I haven’t missed out on 50 varieties of tomato. The number is more like 4000 varieties (based on a casual survey of consumer websites), enough to sample a different kind of tomato every day for a decade, and still have some leftover to leave on the neighbor’s doorstep.
The local tomatoes that I have been enjoying this summer are far superior to anything that I have ever had from Safeway, Albertsons, Savemart, or Trader Joes. And here’s why:
Supermarket tomatoes are grown on high-yield plants to be of uniform size and shape for the purpose of making shipping easier and thus more profitable. They also need to be durable to withstand being transported from one part of the world to another (winter tomatoes in the western U.S. usually come from Mexico, according to the Agricultural Issues Center at U.C. Davis). To increase shelf-life, and to counteract the fact that tomatoes on the same plant ripen at different times, it is common practice to pick tomatoes (and other fruits and vegetables) when they are green and firm, and then expose them to ethylene gas once they have reached their destination. The fruits respond to the gas by ripening quickly and in a uniform manner. Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
What is gained in this process are tomatoes that are available year-round, affordable, and as same-looking as a two Big Macs from two different parts of the globe.
What is lost (besides, in my opinion, flavor) is the genetic diversity of a species, and we’re not talking about wolves or condors (which are also important, but that is the subject of some later post), but rather of a vegetable that makes up an average of 22 pounds of the American diet per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In his book “The Botany of Desire,” author Michael Pollan points out that in reducing the number of varieties of a crop to the ones that are most commercially viable, we also impact the species’ natural ability to resist diseases, insects, heat, cold, or drought via the wonders of genetic diversity.
For example, the ancient Andean peoples grew as many as 100 different varieties of potato in a single valley, to insure that they would have a viable food source regardless of the challenges presented by nature in a given year—the failure of one or two or even a dozen varieties to produce in a given season was not a concern, and was even expected. By contrast, in the mid 19th century the main food staple in Ireland was a single variety of potato, called the “lumper.” In 1845 a fungus blight accidentally imported from North America decimated the crop, resulting in the starvation of over 1 million Irish, 1 out of every 9.
In reading Pollan’s book, I learned that global agribusiness today is, of course, aware of this lesson. But rather than diversify crop varieties, the key strategies employed are to use pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and to hybidize (and often genetically modify) fruits and vegetables in order to produce high-yield, disease and drought resistant products. However, the resulting genetic uniformity of these plants still leaves the crops inherently at risk.
In 1900, 8000 named varieties of apple grew in the U.S., today that number has dropped to 700. I have been hard-pressed to find even a half-dozen varieties in a typical supermarket. Overall, 3000 varieties of vegetables have disappeared from seed catalogues since 1984, a rate of 6% lost per year. Furthermore, The Land Institute of Kansas reports that:
“According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 75 percent of crop diversity was lost during the twentieth century. Modern varieties have supplanted traditional varieties for 70 percent of the word's corn, 75 percent of Asian rice, and half of the wheat in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In 1950, India had 30,000 wild varieties of rice, but by 2015 only 50 are expected to remain.”
Somewhere I once read something about eggs in a basket. . .
So with this cheery thought my tomato re-education concluded. Now the tough question: With this new-found knowledge, what will I do come November when I want to dip my tortilla chip into some freshly made salsa, knowing that purchasing local tomatoes are no longer an option? Herein lies a key message of every posting on this blog—the fact that we as consumers have the ability to make conscious, informed decisions about how we want to live our lives, and we must be aware of how our decisions will affect those around us and those who will come after us.
For example, I could choose to give up tomatoes entirely until they become available locally again next May. Or I can buy organic tomatoes grown from another part of the world, knowing that my money is going toward farming practices that I support, while at the same time hoping that the environmental costs associated with transporting those tomatoes to my plate does not offset those practices. A third option could be to buy to the cheaper, conventional Mexican-grown tomatoes and make my salsa (as is my birthright as a Californian) because it makes me happy, and know that my upbeat mental state plus the money I saved can be used toward supporting other positive, sustainable practices. But this is all fodder for a later post.
For now, at least, local tomatoes are in season and at their peak. So come on out and celebrate tomato diversity at the Community Garden on Saturday. Join me in sampling every juicy pesticide-free, fungicide-free and ethylene-free morsel, and rejoice in knowing that they were transported a mere few hundred feet to your plate, rather than several hundred miles. It’s summer in Chico, tomato-time, so savor, eat, and enjoy every variety while you can.
