After months of crisscrossing Florida, speaking with growers, trade association executives, owners of tomato-packing companies, lawyers, federal prosecutors, county sheriffs, university horticulturalists, plant breeders, farmworker advocates, soup kitchen managers, field workers, field crew leaders, fair housing advocates, one U. S. senator, and one Mexican peasant who came here seeking a better life for his family only to be held for two years as a slave, I began to see that the Florida tomato industry constitutes a parallel world unto itself, a place where many of the assumptions I had taken for granted about living in the United States are turned on their heads.
In this world, slavery is tolerated, or at best ignored. Labor protections for workers predate the Great Depression. Child labor and minimum wage laws are flouted. Basic antitrust measures do not apply. The most minimal housing standards are not enforced. Spanish is the lingua franca. It has its own banking system made up of storefront paycheck-cashing outfits that charge outrageous commissions to migrants who never stay in one place long enough to open bank accounts. Food is supplied by tiendas whose inventory is little different from what you’d find in a dusty village in Chiapas, only much more expensive. An unofficial system of buses and minivans supplies transportation. Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical application. All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities. Meanwhile, tomatoes, once one of the most alluring fruits in our culinary repertoire, have become hard green balls that can easily survive a fall onto an interstate highway. Gassed to an appealing red, they inspire gastronomic fantasies despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a world we’ve all made, and one we can fix. Welcome to Tomatoland.
ROOTS
A Chilean soldier was guarding a lonely garrison in the Atacama Desert near the Peruvian border when the American tomato geneticist Roger Chetelat and his field research team arrived. The sentry obligingly provided what should have been straightforward directions to their destination: Follow the road beside the railroad tracks. As an afterthought, he quietly suggested that they be careful not to stray from the road, adding with a knowing nod, “land mines.”
Chetelat, an athletic fifty-three-year-old, could be mistaken for a high school gym teacher. In fact he is the director of the prestigious C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California Davis, the world’s foremost repository of wild tomato plants and their seeds. On that day in the desert, Chetelat and his group, which included scientists from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, had been retracing a trail that had been cold for fifty years, its route filed away in the records of a Chilean herbarium. With luck—lots of it—the stale information might lead them to a few remote clumps of a wild tomato species called Solanum chilense. If the team was successful, seeds from those plants, which had never before been collected in that area, would become a valuable addition to the center’s collection.
But that was a big “if.” First, there were questions concerning the accuracy of the pre-GPS location, given as simply “kilometer 106-108” on the cog railway that switch-backed through the Andes between Chile’s port city Arica and La Paz, Bolivia. The notation had been scrawled in the journal of a British collector sometime in the 1950s. Even if the directions were valid, a lot can happen in a half-century to an isolated cluster of plants. Roads get built. Gas pipelines go through. Settlements grow. Fields expand. Animals browse. Facing the distinct possibility that they were on botany’s version of the wild goose chase, the researchers had been driving across the desert since dawn and had yet to see anything resembling a wild tomato.
The Atacama Desert makes up the southernmost part of the geographic range of modern tomatoes’ wild ancestors, which still grow in parts of western Chile, Peru, and Ecuador (and the Galapagos Islands, home to two errant species). It is a testament to the adaptability of the tomato clan that its members can survive in the Atacama, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The gravelly, boulder-strewn landscape is fifty times as dry as California’s Death Valley. Some parts have not received a drop of rainfall in recorded history. Chetelat has driven across its surface for an entire day without seeing a single living thing. Most of the plants that survive there are low and scrubby and, during the driest months, brown and to all appearances, dead.
Chetelat was further discouraged when the road they had been told to follow diverged from the rail line several kilometers before they reached their goal. Frustrated but still determined, the driver veered onto the tracks, which were still occasionally used, and bounced and jolted along until that became too uncomfortable. Still well short of the marker, the scientists set out on foot, even though it was getting late in the day and no one wanted to bivouac in a semi-militarized no-man’s-land. It didn’t help that they had not seen a tomato. Until they arrived at kilometer 108, that is. There, just as described, with yellow flowers glowing in the afternoon light, were S. chilense, descendants of the plants seen by the 1950s collector. The researchers’ reward for a long, uncomfortable session in the field was a handful of seeds not much bigger than grains of sand. Chetelat considered it a good day.
If you enjoy tomatoes, it was a good day for you, too. Their field work in many ways echoes the expeditions of those quirky Victorian naturalists who scoured the globe to add botanical curiosities to their collections. But were it not for the efforts of Chetelat and his predecessors and colleagues at the Rick Center to find and conserve all seventeen species that make up the tomato family, there is a very real possibility that tomato production as we know it today would not exist.
Of all the species that played a part in the great Columbian Exchange—the widespread mingling of plants, animals, and disease organisms between the Eastern and Western hemispheres following the establishment of Spanish colonies in the New World—the tomato surely would have topped the list as the least likely to succeed, never mind to become one of our favorite vegetables. Botanists think that the modern tomato’s immediate predecessor is a species called S. pimpinellifolium that still grows wild in the coastal deserts and Andean foothills of Ecuador and northern Peru. Inauspicious and easily overlooked, S. pimpinellifolium fruits are the size of large garden peas. They are red when ripe and taste like tomatoes, but picking a handful of the diminutive fruits as a snack would take several minutes. Gathering enough for a salad or salsa wouldn’t be worth anybody’s effort.
Were it not for a few random genetic mutations—mere flukes—chances are that pre-Columbian Americans would never have bothered to domesticate the plants that bore those tiny red berries. Chetelat speculates that some unknown forager or farmer noticed an unusual S. pimpinellifolium plant, one that produced larger-than-usual fruits. For reasons that are lost to archeologists, these “deformed” plants were not domesticated in the areas where they grew wild. Researchers have found no evidence of tomatoes depicted on the pottery and tapestries made by natives of what is now northern Peru, which were often elaborately adorned by images of foods important to their diet. Instead, tomatoes were domesticated by Mayan or Mesoamerican farmers somewhere in what is now southern Mexico or northern Central America, more than one thousand miles from the home range of their wild kin. The earliest cultivated tomatoes were of the variety S. cerasiforme. Now considered a subspecies of S. lycopersicum (the scientific name for domestic tomatoes), S. cerasiforme looked and tasted like the cherry tomatoes that are sold in plastic clamshell containers in produce sections and scattered atop fast food salads today. In addition to being small-fruited, S. cerasiforme produced long, sprawling vines familiar to any home gardener who has tried to rein in the rampant, weedy growth of varieties like Matt’s Wild Cherry, a co
mmonly available type much like the first tomatoes to be cultivated. If you cut any cherry tomato in half, you will notice that it has only two compartments filled with seeds. Some of the early S. cerasiformes developed mutations that caused them to produce more than two seed cells. Another mutant strain had a gene that dramatically increased the size of its fruits. Selecting plants that produced larger fruits, or fruits with differing shapes and colors, pre-Columbian farmers created tomatoes that resembled most of the varieties available today. When Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1521, tomatoes had become an important part of the indigenous diet. Aztec writings even include a dish calling for hot peppers, salt, and tomatls—the original recipe for salsa. The Aztecs also had another recipe that required tomatoes, according to the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. After his troops captured one city, he wrote that the defenders had already prepared a large pot of salt, peppers, and tomatoes in anticipation that victory would provide them with the final ingredient—the flesh of the invading Spaniards.
Spanish explorers wasted no time introducing the beguiling New World fruit to Europe, where it soon established itself. By 1544, just a little more than two decades after their “discovery,” the Italian herbalist Pietro Andrea Matthioli published the earliest European reference to tomatoes, calling them mala aurea, golden apples. A decade later, Leonhart Fuchs, a German doctor, produced the first known illustration of tomatoes, a colored woodcut showing that the fruit not only arrived in Europe with golden exteriors, as Matthioli’s name suggested, but also red skins and in many different shapes and sizes. At first, Europeans viewed tomatoes as merely decorative, but soon they began using them as medicines, most often to treat eye ailments. Introduced to France, tomatoes were called pommes d’amour (literally “love apples,” but the designation might have been a corruption of the Spanish name, pome dei Moro, or Moor’s apple). By the end of the sixteenth century, tomatoes had finally entered the diet of southern Europeans. Writing in his 1597 Herball, the British barber-surgeon John Gerard reported that “love apples” were eaten in boiled form along with “pepper, salt, and oile” as a sauce, although his assessment of the result would not have made his countrymen salivate in envy of Italian gourmands. “They yield very little nourishment to the bodie, and the same naught and corrupt,” Gerard wrote, adding that tomatoes were “of rank and stinking savor.” Apparently the Italians disagreed. In 1692 the first cookbook mentioning tomatoes was published in Naples, and pomodori were on their way to becoming the signature ingredient of southern Italian cuisine. Although they eschewed eating the “rank and stinking” tomato, the British did begin to use it, not for its culinary merits, but for its curative powers over such maladies as headaches, blockages of the bladder, gout, sciatica, running sores, hot tumors upon the eyes, and vapors in women. The first Britons to dine on these misunderstood love apples were Jews of Portuguese and Spanish ancestry in the mid-1700s.
In the United States, colonists called the love apple by its Mexican name, tomate, and in the years following the Revolutionary War grew it and incorporated it widely into their cooking, although some Americans viewed the fruit as poisonous. They found other uses for it, too. One writer recommended putting fresh vines under blankets as a way to control bedbugs. In the early 1800s, patent medicine hucksters began bottling tomato extract as an elixir, advertising that it would cure ills ranging from constipation to chronic cough to the common cold. Their boosterism sparked a national tomato craze, enabling farmers near big cities to make fortunes. Being prolific, tomatoes provided filling food for hungry soldiers. And being high in acid, they lent themselves to the new technology of risk-free canning. The Union Army left a trail of empty tomato cans in the wake of its campaigns. After the war, the veterans’ appetite remained unabated. Expensive, out-of-season fresh tomatoes became status symbols. Tomatoes even made it all the way to the Supreme Court. To protect American farmers from competition from Caribbean growers of fresh winter tomatoes under the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, the justices in 1893 rewrote the dictionary and decreed that tomatoes were vegetables (they are in fact fruits).
Tomatoes’ near-universal popularity in North American kitchens and gardens today can be traced back to the efforts of one man, Alexander W. Livingston, who was born in 1821 in Reynoldsville, Ohio, just outside Columbus. His career as one of the greatest tomato breeders in history got off to an inauspicious start. In his autobiography, Livingston and the Tomato, he recalls: “Well do I remember the first tomato I ever saw. I was ten years old, and was running down one of those old-fashioned lanes, on either side of which was the high rail fence, then so familiar to all Ohio people. Its rosy cheeks lighted up one of these fence-corners, and arrested my youthful attention. I quickly gathered a few of them in my hands and took them to my mother to ask, ‘What they were?’ As soon as she saw me with them she cried out, ‘You must not eat them, my child. They must be poison for even the hogs will not eat them…. You may go and put them on the mantle, they are only fit to be seen for their beauty.’”
It’s a good thing for tomato lovers that young Alexander ignored his mother’s advice. By 1842, Livingston began working for a local seed grower. A decade later he had purchased his own land and turned his attention to developing a tomato that was distinctly better than the gnarly, hollow, and dry fruits that were the norm in the middle of the nineteenth century. After more than a decade of following the accepted wisdom of the era—saving the seeds from the largest and most promising fruits each year and replanting them the next—Livingston revolutionized crop development. Instead of looking at fruits, he sought out whole plants that had desirable traits and crossbred them with varieties that had complementary qualities. He came across a plant that bore large quantities of perfectly round fruits. Unfortunately, they were small, so he crossed and recrossed those plants with large-fruited varieties until, five years after spotting that first smooth-fruited plant in his field, he perfected a variety he called the Paragon.
In addition to being a talented botanist, Livingston had a gift for writing unabashedly hyperbolic advertising copy—a key job requirement for successful seed catalog copywriters to this day. The Paragon “was the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American public, or, so far as I have ever learned, the first introduced to the world.” Giving himself credit where it was due, he wrote, “With these, tomato culture began at once to be one of the great enterprises of this country.”
Paragon was just the beginning. Livingston himself went on to personally breed a dozen more successful tomatoes, and by 1937 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that half of the tomato varieties in the country owed a genetic debt to Livingston’s early discoveries. It’s a testament to the nineteenth-century plant breeder’s skills that Paragons can still be found in seed catalogs today. I usually put a few in my garden each summer, my way of paying homage to the Great Man. They may not be the best tomato of the season, nor the most prolific, but, as advertised, Paragons are smooth, round, and juicy. If they have anything to apologize for 140 years after their debut, it’s that by being consistently prolific and uniform, they gave rise to the fresh tomato industry whose dubious benefits we reap today.
Florida was a late comer to the commercial tomato game. They were grown there as early as 1870 by two farmers named Parry and Wilson in Alachua in the northern part of the state. Two years later, E. S. Blund was harvesting tomatoes on Sanibel Island in southwest Florida. But Joel Hendrix, a shopkeeper and owner of a commercial steamship dock, as well as a six-acre farm in the settlement of Palmetto, established the commercial model that the Florida tomato industry has followed ever since. On January 6, 1880, Hendrix wrote a letter outlining a business plan that involved exporting green tomatoes from Florida that would ripen on their way to northern markets. He then demonstrated that it could be done successfully by shipping a cargo of the unripe fruit from his field in Manatee County (just south of Tampa and still an important tomato growing a
rea) to New York City. No record remains describing the taste or condition of Hendrix’s fruits, which in that era would have endured a bouncy wagon ride over rutted sand trails before being loaded onto one or more steamships and rail cars for the long, often rough journey north. But fresh fruits and vegetables of any sort were rarities in the North at that time, and the Yankees eagerly gobbled up Hendrix’s out-of-season tomatoes. Establishing another policy that the Florida industry still follows, Hendrix priced his product inexpensively at a level that the average winter-weary New Yorker could afford. Green, cheap, and off-season continue to be the three mercantile legs upon which Florida’s tomato industry stands.
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 2