"Tomatoland": The Global Weirding to Growing Tomatoes

A New Take on the Mutant Tomato, a la Barry Estabrook's narrative "Tomatoland"
 (Photo from Fresh Air's "How Industrial Farming Destroyed the Tasty Tomato", June 28th, 2011)

"In Vermont, where I live, as in much of the rest of the United States, a gardener can select pretty much any sunny patch of ground, dig a small hole, put in a tomato seedling, and come back two months later and harvest something. Not necessarily a bumper crop of plump, unblemished fruits, but something. When I met Monica Ozores-Hampton, a vegetable specialist with the University of Florida, I asked her what would happen if I applied the same laissez-faire horticultural practices to a tomato plant in Florida. She shot me a sorrowful, slightly condescending look and replied, 'Nothing.'"
  -Barry Estabrook, "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit"

Earlier today, while fixing up a Sustainable Santa Fe website on building up environmentally conscious food systems, I came across an interview with former Gourmet contributing editor Barry Estabrook on the ever lively, illuminating radio series, Fresh Air.

Estabrook's newly-published book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, highlights how an iconic crop, the tomato, spread from its origins in a slice of western South America & a feared member of the Solanacae (i.e. nightshade) plant family to becoming one of the most "warred against," mass-produced foodstuffs in American history. From once being a mortifying crop, tomatoes are now grown in Florida at a $1.6 billion scale annually, with Florida supplying over a third of the national tomato supply and over 90% of the supply during fall and winter months. For a more thorough ethnobotanical overview, feel free to read "History, Origin, and Early Cultivation of Tomato" from the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

I will attach a link to the entire Fresh Air interview below. It is especially worth noting the conditions surrounding South Floridian tomatoes, wherein sandy soils, rampant humidity, and other subtropical weather phenomena combine with one of the most illustrative cases of "abject slavery" in the agricultural system among undocumented tomato pickers.

How Industrial Farming Destroyed the Tasty Tomato

If nothing else, we should probably think twice, or however many times it takes, to consider where we not only purchase our tomatoes, but where and how we purchase tomato-derived foodstuffs; need I mention tomato sauces, salsas, stewed tomatoes, ketchup, tomato soup, and beyond(?) Perhaps comes the time we become a bit more adventurous, a bit more curious with how we connect to something so historically luscious and flavor-complex as a fresh, homegrown, sun-ripened (not ethylene-pumped), tomato. Not only growing our own Roma or Princeton varieties, but also crafting our own tomato sauce, salsa, and yes even ketchup from home.

Yes, ketchup that can be stored in Mason jars or other friendly reusables; maybe one won't ever have to fumble their hands in finding a half-empty plastic bottle in the refrigerator or the even more perplexing sight of "ketchup" inserted and sealed shut into mylar...Oh wait, now I hear such a sight is called a "condiment sachet" or "ketchup buster."

I will also attach some rather ingenious recipes and how-tos below, as well as tomato varieties worth growing right outside our backyards & a spiffy eHow video from Jene VanButen of TropicalFruit.com:

Grow and Sell Heirloom Tomatoes

Vegetable Gardening: How to Grow Heirloom Tomatoes (Video)

Canning Tomatoes Recipes: Delicious and Nutritious

Here's to merrier and hopefully juicier tomato feasting! Who knows where The Curious Omnivore will be next, along what feels like a trek through global weirding with hopes for global understanding?

Why We Should Play With Our Food

Hot, Gorgeous Quesadilla Mess Along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, February 2011 (Taken By Matt Young)

Feel free to take a look, however long, of the hot, gorgeous mess of a roadside quesadilla above. This past February, I traveled out to Los Angeles (CA) to gain a better grasp of southern California and to visit a friend I hadn't seen in two years from college. I found myself enamored of what a singular locale this city is, but far beyond the backed-up lines of tourists photographing Michael Jackson's marker along Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame or even the surrealness of an amusement park lodged out on the edge of Santa Monica Pier. Rather, for my last lunch, my last meal in Los Angeles for this trip, I ordered from a roadside cart, a taqueria-turned-quesadilla dynamo run part-time by an effervescent woman, Migdalia.

"Would you like some jalapeno salsa to top it off?," Migdalia asked in her bubbly Latina voice.

Don't mind if I do, and I found myself giddy to dash on that salsa and dance on the sidewalk when I first saw the mess seen above. The jalapenos, the barely day-old tortillas, the even fresher queso de quesadilla, the juicy carne (roasted meat), sour cream, and at least two other medium tomato-based salsas created a gorgeous, serendipitous amalgamation of flavors. Not long afterwards, the inevitable question arose:

What does it mean to eat? I mean, the full definitive scope of that word eat.

As in tracking how any of those quesadilla ingredients, or how the grain for your al dente linguine, arrived on your plate, let alone the exotic paths of the olive oil drizzling between the strands of your pasta of choice;

Or how a juicy, savory cut of beef sirloin traveled from a cattle herd of sprawling megalopolises with corn-loaded feed lots (or perhaps from a maverick deep in green seas of pasturelands) to your grill;

Or how the mountain of arugula greens first sprouted on river valley lowlands, drifting down to the most urbane of plates?

After years of being an undercover foodie, I've run into too many fascinating farmers, consummate cooks, fantastic fruits, and intriguing food systems far too luscious and critical not to share. While parents or society might have told us not to play with our food, what would happen if we not just played, feeling our hands stick in the curves of rising bread dough(?) What if we also delved into actually adventuring about how our food comes to be, how we relate to that which sustains us daily, and in turn how we cultivate healthier people, healthier communities, healthier bioregions, and beyond?

Hence, while diving back into academia in a few months, focusing on Food Systems & Environmental Media at Antioch University-New England, what could be better than to explore the world that nourishes us? Hopefully, this blog can be the beginning of a long trek immersing in how people, cultures, appetites, lands, waters, and of course food interact- from the most intimate of "locavore" webs to global disseminating of food in the most unlikely of places-- tropical Colombian coffee beans grown in humid belts marketed & consumed while feet of snow piling outside a New England coffeeshop(?!)



If you should be of an adventurous, inquisitive, and especially hungry personality, feel free to join in with The Curious Omnivore.