Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  But it won’t be an inexpensive tomato. Scott developed the Tasti-Lee to provide farmers in his state with a crop that can be planted outside to compete with hydroponic, greenhouse-grown tomatoes, the latest competitive threat to the Florida fresh tomato industry. Beginning from almost nothing in the early 1990s, greenhouse tomatoes expanded from a tiny niche-market novelty mostly imported from Europe to a mainstream produce item. They are now in every supermarket and account for about 10 percent of fresh tomato sales. Although Florida’s field-grown slicing tomatoes remain as popular as ever in the food-service industry, sales have declined sharply in supermarkets. With Tasti-Lee, Scott hopes to give growers a baseball-size tomato that packs the same flavor as the popular ping pong ball–size salad tomatoes produced in greenhouses and often sold in clusters on the vine. “It seems to me that it would be a win-win situation,” said Scott. “Consumers tend to be spoiled. They go into the grocery store and they expect to see fresh tomatoes any time of year, even if they grumble about the quality. I want people to buy Tasti-Lees because they like them, not just because they are the only tomatoes there.”

  Like many plant varieties, Tasti-Lee owes its existence to a combination of serendipity and the time-sharpened instincts of a great plant breeder. In Florida, the summer of 1998 was a terrible season for anyone trying to grow a tasty tomato. For some unknown reason—too wet, too cloudy, too hot—Scott’s tomato field tests failed to produce fruits with any sweetness. Even tried-and-true varieties that had been sweet during previous years tasted dull. But one morning after tasting fifty varieties, each more bland than the other, Scott spotted a nice-looking tomato called Florida 7907. He picked a fruit, cut off a wedge, and popped it into his mouth. “Aha!” he said.

  It was sweet, but Florida 7907 had one big flaw that made the variety a nonstarter for commercial production: It was too spherical. Florida growers like their fruits to have defined shoulders and slightly flattened bottoms. And that’s only one item on a list of must-haves. Because producers are paid strictly by the pound, plants first and foremost must produce high yields of large, uniform fruit. They have to be able to resist diseases and tolerate extremes of heat and cold. And their tomatoes need to have a long shelf life. Taste enters the equation, if it enters at all, only after all those conditions are met. “Sometimes I wonder why we even bother with flavor,” said Scott. “There is no easy way to breed for taste. It’s not like there’s one genetic marker that tomatoes must have to taste good,” he said.

  The structure of a tomato also makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act. The gooey part of a tomato, called locular jelly, has most of the all-important acidity. The pericarp tissue, the walls of a tomato, give it strength and some sweetness, but no acidity. The harder a tomato is, the more bland it is likely to taste. Even if you have a perfect balance of sugars and acids, there are still many obstacles in getting decent-tasting tomatoes from field to consumers’ kitchens. Most Florida tomatoes are picked at the so-called mature green stage. Under ideal circumstances, a mature green tomato, reddened by being exposed to ethylene gas, will ripen and develop a measure of taste—not great taste, but something. The problem is that short of cutting one open, there is no definite way to tell a mature green tomato from one that is simply green. Inevitably, some immature tomatoes get picked, and they will never develop flavor, although the ethylene will give them the appearance of ripeness. Finally, even if all else goes according to plan, a tomato can lose its taste if exposed to cold temperatures at any time between harvest and being eaten, after which point it can never recover it. Crop specialists even have a scientific term for this process: “chilling injury.” Whether it happens in a truck, warehouse, produce section, or home refrigerator, a tomato that is held at temperatures lower than 50 degrees soon becomes a tasteless tomato. For reasons unknown, chilling reduces the fragrant volatile chemicals that are all-important in giving the fruit its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, keeping tomatoes cool extends their shelf life, too, so the temptation to refrigerate dogs tomatoes every step of their journey to the table. Years of efforts by a plant breeder can be destroyed by a few days in a refrigerator.

  Scott was also developing a line of what he calls “ultrafirm” tomatoes during the same season he happened on the sweet-flavored 7907. Among those he was developing was a tomato called Florida 8059. It was hard and had the right shape. Sensing a match made in heaven, Scott crossbred the sweet but too-spherical 7907 with the firmer 8059, and in the fall of 2002 the first of what was then referred to as Florida 8153 ripened. Scott thought the new hybrid carried the best traits of both parents. At trials conducted by the university, consumers on test panels agreed. Time after time, 8153 beat out other tomatoes. Subsequent chemical analyses showed that the fruit had a desirable balance of sugars, acids, and volatiles. It also had a surprise bonus: Both of its parents possessed what plant breeders call the “crimson” gene, which was originally revealed when the pioneering tomato geneticist Charlie Rick crossed a wild L. chilense (a relative of the domestic tomato) with a commonly grown variety. The crimson gene gives 8153 a striking fire-engine red color and an extraordinarily high level of lycopene, a sought-after antioxidant. “It sounds like magic, doesn’t it?” said Scott. “It really is, in a way.”

  Florida 8153 had everything going for it, except for a catchy, appetizing name. Scott christened and trademarked his new baby Tasti-Lee, Lee being the first name of his mother-in-law, a tomato lover who had encouraged and supported his research through the years. “You hear lots of stories about bad mothers-in-law, I had a great mother-in-law,” Scott said, a flash of emotion overcoming his usual deadpan. “She had tasted what was then still just called Florida 8153. She really liked it and encouraged me. Sadly, she fell terminally ill. I went to visit her in the hospital. She was in a coma at that point, but I took in a tomato anyway and showed it to her and told her that I was going to name it after her. I like to think she heard me.”

  Four seed companies lined up to bid for rights from the university to produce and distribute Tasti-Lee seeds. The winner was Bejo Seeds, Inc. A large, family-owned, Dutch firm with offices around the world, Bejo’s specialties are cabbage, carrots, and other cool-weather crops. “We felt that marketing would be a key to Tasti-Lee’s success,” said Scott. “It seemed like Bejo would be hungry to get into the tomato market and that they would push Tasti-Lee pretty hard.”

  The job of giving Tasti-Lee that push fell to Greg Styers, Bejo’s sales and product development manager for the southeastern United States, who has been known to board airplanes lugging twenty-five-pound boxes of tomatoes as carry-on baggage. “We had a vision to start with a grassroots movement,” said Styers. “We were going to start with roadside growers and chefs. People who were interested in good flavor and good quality. Then we were going to work our way up.” It didn’t turn out as planned. Styers, who was looking for a grower who shared his vision that Tasti-Lee was “born to be a premium tomato,” approached Whitworth Farms, which grows vegetables on seven hundred acres near Boca Raton, making it a small player in the Florida tomato business. “Whitworth was big enough to deal with some large retailers, but small enough that they were willing to take a chance on Tasti-Lee. It was a perfect fit for us,” said Styers.

  One of Whitworth’s customers was Whole Foods Market. Glenn Whitworth, who owns the farm along with his sister and two brothers, approached one of the company’s produce buyers. Weeks went by before the buyer would even schedule a meeting with Styers and Whitworth. When they did finally get some time, Styers stopped by a Whole Foods store beforehand and bought one of every tomato on display and added a Tasti-Lee to the mix. On the basis of that impromptu conference room taste test, the buyer agreed to test-market Tasti-Lee. In February 2010, Tasti-Lees began appearing in sixteen Whole Foods stores in Florida. By late March, reorders were coming in faster than Whitworth could grow Tasti-Lees. Later that spring, Whole Foods stores as far north as Washington, DC, began to carry Tasti-Lees, and by
the end of the year, other retailers and even a few restaurant chains were expressing interest. “I think the stars really lined up for Jay when he developed this variety. It truly is remarkable,” Styers said.

  Scott, who drawls his carefully chosen words with little inflection and almost no emotion, didn’t go that far. “I stand behind it,” he said. “For a full-size tomato, it’s better in my opinion than what’s out there. Hopefully, it goes.” If it doesn’t, Scott has plenty to keep him busy. He’s currently developing heat-tolerant tomatoes, tomatoes with resistance to the virulent leaf-curl virus, and tomatoes that can be grown on the ground and theoretically harvested by machine. And he hasn’t given up on flavor. “In some work we’ve done, there is this fruity-floral note that adds pique to the sweetness,” he said. “We’ve crossed a big, crimson tomato with that trait into one of Tasti-Lee’s parents. The result might have even better flavor.”

  In the race to build a better tomato, Scott faces stiff collegial competition from Harry Klee, a fellow University of Florida professor who works out of a laboratory in Gainesville, a few hours’ drive north of Scott’s test plots. Although the goal is the same—a tomato that can be grown commercially in Florida and come out with taste intact—the two researchers are taking diametrically opposite routes to get there. And they bring differing personalities to the problem. Klee, fifty-seven, is tall and athletic and looks like he’s ready at any moment to push himself away from the computer keyboard for a quick round of pick-up basketball. He speaks in eloquent, neatly structured sentences, posing Socratic questions, as he might during a classroom lecture, then answering them himself. He zips around campus in a nonprofessorial two-seater BMW convertible and brings the same unorthodox approach to the tomato project. Instead of focusing on the types of tomatoes that have dominated the market—ones favored by growers and shippers, who want toughness, disease resistance, and bulk—Klee started with consumers, who are crying for decent-tasting fruit. “We have two goals,” he told me. “One is to define what a good-tasting tomato is, and two is to find the genes that control the processes that make good taste and breed them back into tomatoes. To do that, we are bringing together molecular biology and psychology.”

  When I reached him by telephone to set up a time to discuss his work, Klee immediately enlisted me as a guinea pig. That’s how I found myself one sunny February morning sequestered in the sensory testing lab of the University of Florida’s Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition. But before I was allowed to put a morsel of tomato in my mouth, I had to undergo a battery of psychological tests to determine how much of a foodie I am. I sat and filled out a form that asked questions that had nothing to do with tomatoes and at times became too personal for comfort. What was the strongest dislike of any kind that I had experienced? The name of a former boss leapt to mind. Strongest liking? My three daughters, of course. The strongest sensation I had ever experienced? Kidney stones. I was asked what the most pleasant experience I had ever had was, where I would rank my most pleasant taste experience compared to that, and where the taste of the best tomato I’d ever eaten stood in comparison to the best thing I’d ever eaten. The goal of these questions was to determine whether taste was an important sense to me, and if so, where tomatoes ranked among my preferences, or whether I even liked them at all. After I handed my survey to a graduate student, a sliding door opened in a plain white wall in front of me, and a pair of hands in surgical gloves pushed through a plate containing a halved cherry tomato. I tasted. It lacked the acidic balance of a truly great tomato. I gave it a score of 60 on a range of -100 (ghastly) to 100 (exquisite) on the keyboard in front of me and waited for another offering. In all, I chewed through six varieties of tomatoes: Red Pear, Cherry Roma, Ailsa Craig, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Tommy Toe heirlooms, and, as a control, a Cherry Berry hybrid bought at a local Wal-Mart.

  In his efforts to build a better tomato, Klee has joined forces with a multidisciplinary team that includes psychologists, food scientists, statisticians, and molecular biologists. “It is a very achievable goal,” said Klee, a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department. “I’ll predict that within five to ten years, you’ll see significant improvements in the flavors of industrial tomatoes. The seed companies have finally woken up and realized that there is a big problem with lack of flavor and that people are willing to pay for better-tasting tomatoes. They see that there is money to be made there.” An alumni of the genetic engineering giant Monsanto, Klee allows that the process would be quicker and simpler if he were to use genetic modification—simply taking the desirable genes from a tasty tomato and splicing them into the DNA of industrial fruit. That is precisely the sort of work he did at Monsanto, where he designed a tomato that had a much longer shelf life than conventional fruits. “It worked beautifully,” he said. “But we developed it at the time when the public turned against genetically modified foods, so Monsanto dropped the whole program.” Recognizing that consumers are wary of genetically modified plants, Klee has chosen to go the slow, painstaking route this time—one of the advantages of being in academia, he said. Much like Scott, Klee uses traditional breeding techniques of cross-pollinating plants and sorting through thousands of their offspring, hoping to find one that has the traits they seek.

  Klee is convinced that tomato breeders took a wrong turn fifty years ago. “If you ask commercial seed companies why they are making tomato varieties that have lost all their flavor, the answer is very simple,” he explained. “They have focused all their energies on their customers. Who are their customers? The commercial growers. What does a grower get paid for? Yield, size, and appearance. They make more money for very large tomatoes than they do for small ones. The grower is not paid for flavor. So you have a fundamental disconnect between what growers want and what consumers expect.”

  By these criteria, no one can say that breeders have failed to give factory tomato farming the plants it wants. Per acre yields of tomatoes have gone up an astounding fivefold since the 1930s. Since 1970 alone, they have increased by a factor of three. “It’s incredible,” said Klee. “If you think of any other agricultural crop where you’ve had increases like that, it becomes mind boggling. If you did that with corn, you’d be feeding the world. But as you focus on making the tomato bigger and firmer, you are ruining the flavor, pure and simple. Yields have simply outpaced the plants’ abilities to fill the fruit with flavor and nutrients. What we have ended up with is something that’s large but has basically had all the good points diluted out of it. They’ve essentially taken the package and added water. Strawberries are the same story, but tomatoes are probably the worst example.”

  Neglected for a half-century, the genes that once gave commercial tomatoes taste have become lost. To rediscover those genes, tasting panels such as the one I joined are working their way through 150 varieties of nonhybrid heirloom tomatoes, survivors from a time when taste mattered to growers. However, identifying what makes a tasty tomato is anything but straightforward. Although the statement would be sacrilege to any food snob worth his or her Himalayan salt, Klee asserts that not all heirlooms taste good. To prove his point, he handed me a golf ball–size dark red fruit. “This is a Stupice heirloom,” he said. I bit in and winced. It tasted musky and sour—worse than any store-bought fruit, whose main sin is utter lack of taste, not taste you can’t wait to rinse from your mouth.

  “Tomato flavor is really complicated,” Klee explained. “And because of that complexity, not much science had been done on it until we started ten years ago.” A combination of sugars, acids, and volatiles (the technical name for chemicals we can smell, often at minute levels measured in a few parts per billion) determines the tomato taste. Having the right balance of sugar and acids—mainly in the form of citric and malic (the latter is responsible for the tart taste of green apples), with more citric than malic—provides a foundation on which tomato taste can be built. But since most of what we perceive as flavor is actually aroma, it is the fifteen or twenty volatile compounds th
at have the biggest impact on tomato taste. They have names that you are not likely to find on the menu of your favorite restaurant: cis-3-hexenal, beta-ionone, beta-damascenone, 1-penten-3-one, 2+3 methylbutanal, 2-isobutylthiazole, 1-nitro-2, methyl salicylate, and phenylacetaldehyde. Of those, perhaps a half-dozen are critical. Without them, a tomato will not taste like a tomato. “You’ve got all these different compounds that are all synthesized by different chemicals independent of each other, so you have a huge scientific problem to solve,” Klee said. “We’ve identified fifty genes that affect flavor.” With other fruits, the chemical equation is much simpler. A banana, for instance, owes its distinctive flavor to a single chemical, isoamyl acetate. Furaneol is closely linked to strawberry taste.

  Klee took the cap off a vial containing a clear liquid and waved it under my nose. I got a dizzying snootful of Juicy Fruit gum. “You’re smelling beta-ionone,” he said, passing me another vial. I sniffed again. There was no mistaking the summery fragrance of roses. “That is 2-phenylethanol, and it is actually a major component of rose scent,” he said. The next vial brought my winter-weary nose profound memories of fresh-cut grass after spring’s first mowing. Klee said it was cis-3-hexenol. A vial containing beta-damascenone had woodsy and fruit flavored notes that I associated with grapes and wine. Juicy Fruit, roses, cut grass, grapes—none of these volatiles smelled anything remotely like a tomato, yet Klee believes that all of them have to be present to deliver the fruit’s signature flavor. Klee explained, “You need the whole package. If you bit into a tomato that was really high in 2-phenylethanol, you’d say, ‘That tastes like a rose.’ There is no one chemical that you’d smell and say, ‘Oh, tomato.’ It’s a combination of all of them.”