Tomatoland (23 page)

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 that 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.”

The
taste panel was part of Klee’s attempt to identify which volatiles in what concentrations make a tomato taste good. The small
heirloom called
Cherry Roma—the epitome of the tomato’s dance between sweetness and tartness—has consistently won top marks. Larger varieties such as
Bloody Butcher and Brandywine, much beloved by home gardeners, have also scored well. Once the test panels had identified about twenty varieties that consistently scored highly, he chopped those tomatoes up and placed his scientific salsa in a machine called a “gas chromatograph”—in essence, an artificial nose—to “sniff” out volatiles in the choice breeds.

In consultation with Howard Moskowitz
, a renowned food scientist who has worked with major companies like Pepsi, Campbell’s Soup, and General Mills foods to develop new products (his discovery that some consumers like chunky spaghetti sauce made Prego a runaway success and gave birth to an entire class of bottled spaghetti sauces), the University of Florida researchers devised a computer model to provide scientific underpinning to the preferences of the hundreds of participants in taste panels. Klee unfolded a printout that looked like an electrocardiogram, with wavy lines running across the page. One axis of the graph listed chemicals, the other a single tomato variety. The lines represented the content of each chemical in the tomatoes. Klee jabbed his pen at a peak. “This beta-ionone,” he said. “We’re finding that tomatoes that rate highly overall always have high concentrations of beta-ionone.” Using his elaborate statistical tools, Moskowitz will be able to create a “formula” for a good tomato, telling Klee the concentrations of volatiles and other chemicals he should aim for. “What we end up with is a blueprint,” Klee said. “Then we have to figure out how to reproduce that blueprint.”

That involves searching for the specific genes that cause tomatoes to produce beta-ionone and each of the other desirable chemicals. That search is rooted in a greenhouse a few hundred yards from Klee’s lab, where he pampers some of the vilest-tasting tomatoes on the planet. They don’t even look like tomatoes: They’re green, and as hard, small, and unyielding as a pebble. But their beauty lies at the genetic level. By crossing wild-tomato relatives like these with
domesticated varieties, botanists can see what genes produce what chemicals—a process Klee likens to discovering that a criminal you are looking for lives in California. “You’ve narrowed the search considerably, but you still have a long way to go.”

The criminal justice analogy is apt. To zero in on the gene he wants, Klee deploys the same DNA technology that police investigators use to identify suspects. He has now discovered about half of the volatiles he thinks must be present in a good tomato. Once all of them have been found, they’ll be a tool kit that breeders can use to reintroduce tasty traits into industrial-grade fruits. “There is no one perfect tomato,” said Klee. “It’s comparable to walking down the soft drink aisle in the supermarket. Some people are going to prefer Diet Coke, some Coke Zero, some Classic. We’ve found that Hispanic people prefer harder, more tart tomatoes than northeasterners. Probably because Hispanics are going to chop up a tomato and put it in salsa, while someone in the Northeast might slice it and put it in a sandwich. Different uses, different tomatoes. But there are some common traits. I think we can find them and re-create a pretty good tomato,” he said.

Pretty good for consumers looking for an out-of-season tomato worth its name. But how good can a consumer feel knowing that the tasty tomato has been raised and harvested by the most abused workforce in the country?

Fortunately, a scattering of groups and individuals are trying to address that problem. They may not have PhDs in biochemistry and horticultural science (although a few have Ivy League law degrees), but they are approaching the challenges of improving the lots of the people who bring us our food with the same persistence and tenacity as Scott and Klee bring to their breeding programs. They are far from their goals, but like Scott and Klee, they know where they want to go.

BUILDING A
BETTER TOMATO

THE FARMER

Road 74 bisects Charlotte County, running fifty miles due east from the Gulf Coast town of Punta Gorda toward Lake Okeechobee. It cuts a perfectly straight line through sparse, featureless fields dotted with herds of grazing cattle.
Tom Beddard had provided me
with the address of
Lady Moon Farms, his mixed vegetable operation, but it had been twenty minutes since I last saw a street sign, house number, or for that matter, anything I would classify as a building.

My cell phone rang. It was Beddard. “Where are you now?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“You’ll see our packinghouse on the north side of the road. Can’t miss it,” he assured me.

A few miles farther along the highway, I pulled into a sandy parking lot in front of a beige warehouselike building. The place looked deserted—no other vehicles in the lot, no workers scurrying about, no sign reassuring a visitor that this lonely outpost was, indeed, Lady
Moon Farms. I got out of my car. No one answered my knock on the front door. Around the side of the building, a lift truck stood idle beside some parked tractors and wagons. Assuming that I had stopped at the wrong place, I turned back to my car. Then I noticed a white pickup truck speeding toward the building on a lane between the rows. It stopped beside me. A middle-aged man with short salt-and-pepper hair looked me over from head to toe before unfolding himself from behind the wheel. He administered the sort of no-nonsense handshake you’d expect from a six-foot-five-inch, sun-weathered farmer. “Jump in, I’ll show you around the farm.”

I had come to Lady Moon to see the all but impossible, if the horticulturalists I had spoken with were to be believed. Since the late 1990s, Beddard had been growing tomatoes and other vegetable crops in South Florida using purely
organic practices—no synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides—and succeeding on a commercial scale. Lady Moon Farms is the largest organic grower on the East Coast.
Whole Foods Market is one of its major customers. In order to maintain a year-round supply of products, Beddard farms 850 acres in South Florida, 450 acres in Georgia, and 300 acres in Pennsylvania. “When I first came down here, everyone told me that you can’t do organic in Florida,” he said.

From where I sat in the cab, it was evident that he had proven them wrong. Square-edged rows covered tightly in white plastic stretched off to a distant cane windbreak. It was mid-October, still early in the growing season, and deep green tomato plants stood knee-high at three-foot intervals above the plastic. In the distance, a tractor crept along a row towing a sprayer behind it that filled the air with white mist. In another corner of the field, a group of Hispanic men were bent over the young plants. To me, Beddard’s fields looked exactly like those of Ag-Mart, Six L’s, Pacific Tomato Growers, or any other large conventional grower. But Beddard assured me that appearances were deceiving. That tractor was spraying
Bacillus thuringiensis
, a popular organic
insecticide that is made from bacteria
that are naturally present in the soil. The workers were wielding squeegees that had been soaked in common household vinegar to kill or slow the growth of weeds.

His biggest challenge in Florida, he said is getting nutrients into the sandy soil. “It has no fertility at all,” he said. “And growing full-size slicing tomatoes is particularly hard because they have to stay in the ground for such a long time that they can use up all the nutrients we’ve worked in before they ripen.” Beddard spreads spent compost from mushroom farms over his land before crops go in. When they are harvested, he plants his fields in
cover crops of sorghum and cowpeas, which add nitrogen and also help ward off the nematodes that conventional growers kill with toxic fumigants like methyl bromide and methyl iodide. He pointed to a field that was ready to be prepared for planting. It looked like a stubbly hayfield that had been cut but not baled. “The cover crops were hip high before we mowed it,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of organic matter there.” Conventional farmers allow their fields to grow up in weeds during the off season, which they then kill with herbicides. Beddard simply disks his cover crops into the soil. And where a conventional farmer would grow tomatoes in the same field year after year, Beddard practices crop
rotation—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, salad greens. He says that his yields are lower than his chemically dependent colleagues, sometimes significantly, but he more than recoups the differences in yields through the higher prices he can command for organic produce. “I go down there to Immokalee and I envy those guys with their plants just hanging with tomatoes,” he said. “But I probably make more than they do per acre.”

Beddard, who is fifty-five years old, grew up a city boy in Pittsburgh. His parents were shocked when at age sixteen he announced that he wanted to become a farmer, but they allowed him to study horticulture at Delaware Valley College in southwestern Pennsylvania. In those days, the school not only did not teach organic farming techniques, it actively frowned on them. But even as an inexperienced
student, Beddard thought that there was something viscerally wrong with using poisonous chemicals to grow food we would eventually put in our mouths. “I was viewed as a renegade with a hippie philosophy,” he said.

Upon graduation, Beddard discovered that there wasn’t any job he could get with his horticulture degree, aside from going into agribusiness or selling agricultural chemicals, so in 1988 he and his wife, Chris (who died in a car accident in 2004), bought twenty acres in Pennsylvania, five of which were tillable. Over the next ten years, Lady Moon grew steadily, selling first to local health food stores and eventually to larger supermarket accounts. The Beddards purchased more land as business increased and expanded from a two-person organization that dragooned the Beddards three children during peak periods to one that now employs 150 workers year-round. “I was fortunate that I hit the organic scene just as it was starting to take off,” said Beddard.