Although the name may sound like a shining endorsement, it also possesses undertones of Eden’s dangerous fruit. Mattioli correctly classified the tomato as belonging to the nightshade family, and because other members of the nightshade family were known to induce hallucination and death when ingested, many folks were understandably skeptical about biting into the newfangled golden apple. Mind you, these same people were willing to drip nightshade poison into the sensitive mucous membranes of their own eyes. The tomato’s close cousin, belladonna—literally translated as “pretty woman”—was so named because elegant ladies would squirt it in their eyes to induce pupil dilation (an act that belongs in encyclopedias next to foot binding and five-inch stilettos, under Things We Shouldn’t Do to Our Bodies to Look Sexy).
Alas, the Italians got off to a rocky start with the fruit that would eventually become a focal point of their national cuisine. Meanwhile, the French found themselves romanced by the tomato’s latent sensuality. Poison? Non, mes amis, c’est la pomme d’amour. Nightshade be damned: in France, the tomato became known as the love apple, an aphrodisiac that was especially palatable when paired with butter, cream, a hearty cheese, wine, and crusty bread—and for all that, it remained remarkably friendly to the figure.
Despite French passion for the fruit, the tomato’s reputation continued to suffer. In the 1700s it was dealt a severe blow by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. Nightshade hallucinations often involve a feeling of flying, so nightshade was popularly associated with witchcraft; in German folklore, witches used nightshade as a lure for werewolves. This history clearly factored into Linnaeus’ scientific name for the tomato: Solanum lycopersicum. Leave it to a Northern European to take “plump thing with a navel”—also known as “golden/love apple”—and turn it into “quieting wolf-peach.” Scottish botanist Philip Miller later upgraded the tomato to Lycopersicon esculentum or “edible wolf-peach.”
Which brings us back to the question of poison. Why weren’t the tomatoes consumed by the Mason family in 1963 edible? As it turned out, the family’s green-thumb son had grafted a tomato vine onto jimson weed, a hardy, frost-tolerant close cousin of the tomato. On the surface, the idea was brilliant—and, in fact, it’s the same concept that lies behind all commercial fruit production today. Take a delicious, but perhaps less-than-vigorous, fruiting plant and stick it onto the most vigorous root stock you can find. With a bit of luck, you’ll end up with healthier plants, consistent production in a variety of environments, and more fruit.
The Masons’ grafting experiment didn’t go quite so smoothly. The graft took, and soon jimson tomatoes were flourishing in the Masons’ backyard. But when the family sat down to taste their first slice of homegrown summer, they learned the hard way that not all plant varieties are suitable as rootstocks—and that, in fact, we’re very lucky to be able to eat tomatoes at all.
The leaves of the tomato plant are toxic if ingested. However, unlike jimson weed, they do not produce toxins that are carried up to and concentrated within the fruit. (Word to the wise: If your goal is to produce a healthful, edible fruit, don’t graft anything onto a plant that has a habit of concentrating poison in fruit.)
Today, Americans spend more than four billion dollars31 on more than 160 varieties of perfectly edible golden apples. Thanks to intrepid tomato eaters like Colonel Johnson and Thomas Jefferson (who also reputedly ate a tomato in public to prove it wasn’t poisonous), by the 1800s the tomato was not only accepted in America, it was turning into an industry. Seed catalogue sales soared. Farmers developed varieties suited to their regional growing conditions and tastes. The tomato became what it is today: a food fit for everyday sandwiches, soups, sauces, casseroles—pretty much anything, in fact, except dessert.
Would that the history of the tomato concluded there and xitomatl fruited happily ever after. But the tomato—sweet/ succulent, toxic/healthful—continues its series of identity crises. In the United States, different legislative bodies have, at different times, declared the tomato to be a vegetable, a fruit, or both. In 1883 the Supreme Court determined it to be a vegetable. Yes, that’s right: not only did the highest court in the land debate what food group the tomato belongs in, they also got it wrong. Despite the existence of botany and taxonomy, both well-developed disciplines in the late 1800s, the Court decided that the culinary uses of the tomato (for use with a main dish rather than a dessert) rendered it a vegetable for tariff purposes—a designation that continues to this day.
Meanwhile, botanists, biologists, and anyone who has passed a reasonably robust biology course would argue that a tomato is undeniably a fruit. It’s not the round sensuality of the thing that renders it a fruit, but the actual act of flower sex. The male stamen fertilizes the female pistil—tomatoes are self-pollinating, so this process takes place entirely within a single flower, triggered by the vibration of a breeze or a bee’s wings—and produces fertile seeds encased in a nutritious body that provides a dispersal mechanism for the seeds. In short, fruit. (Note that eggplants, cucumbers, and squash share this scientific definition despite vegetative culinary use, but no one cares enough about them to fight about it.)
And so we return to the tomato plant—fruit, vegetable, deadly, and delicious—and the process of growing it.
In short order, we unloaded eighty seedlings from the station wagon and set them down on the field. They’d spend two nights adjusting to life outside the comforts of the greenhouse—“hardening off” in farmer-speak—before being transplanted into two long rows.
Beets, beans, potatoes, and tomatoes: the farm was starting to take shape.
We decided to prune the vines, another point of debate in the tomato world. We’d trim off the runners, shoots that sprout between forks in the vine, effectively channeling more of the plant’s energy into producing fruit rather than bushy foliage. Is trimming runners worth the effort? Some farmers say no, others yes. Pruned plants can tower overhead, tied up to six- or even eight-foot wooden stakes, while unpruned plants tend to be shorter and bushier. The answer to the pruning debate often depends on scale. We decided to prune because we had only eighty plants, all of which were indeterminate, meaning they’d produce fruit continuously for the duration of the season. (Determinate plants set fruit all at once, so there’s little sense in pruning them.) While most large-scale commercial tomato farms grow determinate tomatoes—allowing harvesting machines to come through and essentially rip out the entire plant while pulling the fruit—we preferred plants that would keep on giving week after week.
Correction: We preferred plants that should keep on giving week after week.
After dutifully amending the soil, carefully transplanting the tomato starts, pruning all runners, and religiously watering the plants, you’d think the tomato plants might consent to setting fruit. Instead, several decided to protest, and showed their dissatisfaction by refusing to grow, allowing their leaves to curl and shrivel, or donning an odd spotted motif. When that happens, gardening books told us, the dutiful gardener must rip out the affected plants and burn them lest his whole field become contaminated. Oh, and we couldn’t replant tomatoes in those fields for two to three years.
There’s a reason large-scale commercial operations don’t tend to grow heirloom tomatoes. Namely, heirloom tomatoes can be overly sensitive to insect-borne diseases like spotted wilt virus, mosaic virus, bacterial canker, septoria leaf spot, grey leaf spot, bacterial speck, bacterial spot, or syringae leaf spot. (They also crack open easily on the vine, and their irregular shapes and sizes make it tough to pack them efficiently by the tens of thousands.)
And unlike large-scale commercial operations, which harvest their tomatoes while they’re still green and hard, ripening them through a complicated process using special hormonetriggering gasses, we’d wait to harvest our tomatoes until they were ready to eat. We’d be trucking them only five minutes down the road, after all. And vine-ripened fruit has a balanced blend of sugar and acid that is unparalleled: one reason why people shop at the farmers�
�� market in the first place. Now, if only the vines would stay alive long enough to ripen the fruit.
Chapter 5:
LITTLE MONSTERS
Summer Squash
In a few short weeks, July had decidedly and undeniably turned the corner into August: the miracle month.
Scrawny seedlings had come into their own. No longer tentative, sprawling squash plants, bushy tomatoes, and bean hedges debuted with confidence, crowding out the weeds with their bright green gowns. Paparazzi bees swarmed the orange squash blossoms. The Patch was no longer a swath of dirt stitched with occasional green thread; it had become a bolt of rich green fabric ribbed by narrow dirt paths. We were over an acre now, which definitely pushed us past the garden category. At some point we blinked, and in that split second the farm assumed an air of ramshackle legitimacy. Small, none of the rows precisely straight, but prolific. Our series of screw-ups—dead seedlings, insect massacres, chicken funerals—was a distant dream. I wished it had been more gradual, that I could have built up slowly to the climax. But the transition was sudden. One day we were fretting over the loss of a squash plant that fell victim to a gopher; the next, we were fielding a deluge. Hope and aspiration were replaced by the physical reality of constant harvest.
So this was what it felt like to be a farmer.
The night was warm. My knuckles itched. My forearms, ankles, calves, and shins itched. My palms itched—not that it meant, as legend dictates, that I’d be coming into money anytime soon. (Summer squash—the root of this itch—fetches two dollars per pound at most.)
As far as I could tell, to feel like a farmer was to feel consistently uncomfortable. And to look like a farmer at locations other than the farmers’ market made other people uncomfortable, too. Overalls and a straw hat do not a farmer make: squash rash, cracked knuckles, and stained hands do.
Over the course of the season, different crops had modified my body. My skin revealed the most visible changes. The contact dermatitis that appeared like clockwork on Tuesdays and Fridays—harvest days—was courtesy of our squash plants. I couldn’t bring myself to don long sleeves and pants in 100-degree weather, so I suffered the consequences of exposing my body’s largest organ to the ravenous Cucurbita pepo. Tender squash fruits grow at the heart of the plant, sometimes several feet inside the monster’s outermost reaches. These beasts belong in Jurassic Park: deep, fern-green foliage; long, thick stalks; massive leaves bigger than my head. And all of it festooned with tiny, sharp-toothed thorns—thorns that never quite puncture the skin, but irritate it enough to leave the unhappy harvester itching and scratching as she lies in bed at night, waiting for sleep to come. So my arms and legs were always a little red and chafed. The squash rash lasted about a day, and the late-night rake marks from my fingernails lasted the next two, until it was time to harvest squash again.
Then there were my hands, which would make a manicurist weep. I was proud of my shovel-ready palms, thickly callused in all the right places. I could, however, have done without the cracked fingertips and knuckles, and the splinters that were always appearing and disappearing and trading places with the inevitable abrasions and cuts.
I couldn’t pin the cracks on any one plant—it was just a general weathering, exposure to the wind and sun and earth, that dried out my fingers and left them canyoned. But for the stains that reached from my fingertips to my palms, I could thank our earliest nightshades, the cherry tomatoes. If you’ve ever picked a few tomatoes off the vine, you might have noticed that your fingertips developed a slight green-brown tinge to them. If you pick a few hundred, that tinge turns into an inky brown encasement that stubbornly resists rinsing. With a lot of soap and scrubbing, you can dilute the stuff sufficiently to send some of it swirling down the drain. It is difficult enough to remove the substance from smooth skin, but I found that getting it out of the cracks was impossible.
Which is why my hands drew reactions at the grocery check stand: each imperfection was inked, the rough nails and split skin and abrasions and splinter-holes clearly outlined by the tomatoes’ brown stains. When I placed my cereal boxes on the conveyor belt, those in line behind me must have wondered why hand soap, scrub brushes, and lotion weren’t heaped in my shopping cart. But I had stopped striving for manicured hands. Mine were a work of art in their own right, a map of hard work and harvest.
The rest of my body was changing, too. I couldn’t run a marathon or swim a mile. I couldn’t remember the last time I exercised for the sake of exercising. Moving muscles for their own sake seemed silly when there were other things they should be doing, like weeding beets. There were always beets to weed. But the work-exercise was imperfect, unbalanced, turning me prematurely into an old fart. My breaking back, my sore neck, my stiff knees!
And always, my body was slightly warm with exhaustion, so bone-tired when it hit the bed that sleep should have been easy, if it weren’t for the hot night and the ache in the back and the itching and Emmett tossing and turning beside me, making it hard to settle down and find that perfect place where everything could just sink toward the floor and stop work at last.
NPR was on the radio, a comforting drone. As with so many market mornings, I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d fallen asleep, nor was I entirely clear on why I was here in the passenger seat, pulling on socks as we drove down the dirt road to the field before the full moon had set. Emmett was just starting to pull the truck onto the shoulder that separated the road from the tomato rows when he slammed on the brake. My head, which had been leaning against the window, banged against the overhead handle.
“What the hell?”
The truck stopped and I swung open my door to the sound of a rushing river. In the glow of the headlights, I could see an island surrounded by muddy water. Beyond the island, a small sea lapped at the edges of the tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash. On the island perched a plastic chair, and to the plastic chair was taped a hand-written note.
My mind was as muddy as the water, and as the water sought the lowest point, so did my thoughts. We had left this place less than twelve hours ago, and what the fuck?
What the fuck.
Seriously, what the fuck?
The note was difficult to read, given the lack of light and our inability to get within ten feet of it. This was the middle of summer, which typically meant four months without rain, so we didn’t exactly bring waders. Eventually I was able to recognize enough of the letters that I could fill in the ones I couldn’t read like a crossword puzzle. The note, in Emmett’s dad’s handwriting, said something about sorry for backing into the pipe, it was late and dark, and that he’d be back in the morning to fix it.
Ah yes, the pipe. It clearly needed fixing, seeing as how it was cracked in half and gushing water like a ruptured fire hydrant, threatening to drown our newly productive summer crops.
“Well, it probably wasn’t surrounded by water when he left the note there,” I said slowly, trying to untangle the strange scene before me. Blinking repeatedly seemed to help. “That wouldn’t make sense. He wouldn’t wade out into the water to leave a note, right?”
Emmett walked along the mud-water shore before digging his cell phone out of his pocket and making the call.
“It’s still going?” I heard a groan emanate from the cell phone; it matched my mood. “I shut off the main water valve last night. It should have stopped.”
This is what it feels like to be a farmer: it feels like things are always going wrong, and that if only Equipment X wouldn’t leak/break/rust/rupture/spontaneously discombobulate, life would be so much easier and the farm so much more productive.
The phone conversation droned on. I blew on my fingers, which had gotten cold, and watched the water rush out of the broken pipe. I found it sort of soothing, like watching a fire dance.
I heard a snap: Emmett closing his phone. “My dad’s going to try and figure out why it didn’t stop, and then try and fix it,” Emmett said. We both eyed the geyser and the rising miniature lake that was a foot away f
rom our precious Armenian cucumbers. “Hopefully it won’t take too long.”
Emmett headed to the back of the truck to pull out the harvest bins. For now we’d just circumnavigate Foggy River Lake to reach the vegetables. Flood or no, it was Saturday morning: time to harvest and hurry to the Healdsburg farmers’ market.
August summer mornings at the market were so bright they were almost cartoonlike. The squash, more than anything, was to blame: the Martha Stewart palette of daffodil yellows and lime greens seemed more suited to paint swatches than produce. I admit, Emmett and I had become a bit obsessed over the display aspect of the market. The farmers’ market adage—pile ’em high and watch ’em fly—had given way to a more cultured approach. Pile them high in artfully arranged piles, the location of which were determined based on shade requirements, color, shape, and texture (in that order); accent as needed with baskets, tablecloths, and simple handwritten price signs; rearrange at least twice until perfect; then, watch them fly.
The rat’s nest of crookneck squash, butter-yellow necks twined together, roiled next to a pile of staid, dark green Romanesco zucchini stacked neatly in rows. On the other side of the Romanesco, yellow zucchini, also neat. Next to them lay the twisty, pale green Armenian cucumbers. And then the patty pans lineup: acorn-shaped or scalloped-edged, clad in lime green and evergreen and daffodil yellow. The display was all about carefully controlled chaos and a feeling of exciting, but not messy, abundance. And of course, quality counted—everything here was harvested multiple times a week to keep it pretty and petite. We weren’t selling summer squash monsters, the sort that families use as car bodies in the annual farmers’ market zucchini car races. We were selling young, tender squashlets—as popular parlance has it, baby squash. And like all baby foods (lettuce, arugula, bok choy, cucumbers, beets) they were highly sought after by the foodie crowd.
The Wisdom of the Radish Page 10