Tomatoland (3 page)

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 commonly 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 area) 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.

Other farmers followed Hendrix’s lead. By 1890, a decade after that first shipment, there were 214 acres of tomatoes growing in Manatee County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The industry never looked back. Aided by the arrival of the
railroad in 1884, land under tomato production in Florida increased to 6,675
acres by 1900, in no small part because the crop thrived in the virgin, disease-free soil. Those carefree days ended abruptly in 1903 when an outbreak of
fusarium wilt wiped out tomato plantings. But with plenty of vacant land to exploit, growers simply abandoned diseased fields and cleared new ones, slowly pushing inland from the coast. By 1930, there were twenty-nine thousand acres of tomatoes growing in the Sunshine State.

That was around the time
that scientists perfected
commercial applications for artificially exposing unripe fruits and vegetables to ethylene, a gas that plants produce naturally as a final step in maturing their fruits. Writing in a 1931 issue of
Industrial and Engineering Chemistry
,
E. F. Kohman, a researcher with the
National Canners Association, observed that if gassed with ethylene, tomatoes could be picked before they were fully ripened and therefore would withstand handling better than their nongassed counterparts, although he acknowledged: “It should be clearly understood that by no known method of ripening except on the vine can a tomato be produced equal in quality to a tomato fully ripened on the vine.” Although Florida farmers wholeheartedly embraced the idea of artificially “degreening” their unripe crops, Kohman’s concerns about quality were quickly forgotten.

The person most responsible
for ushering in the
boom years of the Florida tomato industry was an unsuccessful Cuban lawyer named
Fidel Castro. Until the embargo of the early 1960s, Florida tomato farmers faced stiff competition from produce grown on the balmy island to the south. But with a stroke of President Kennedy’s pen in 1962, no more
Cuban tomatoes could be had in the United States. Florida wasted no time stepping into the void. In 1960 the state grew about 450 million pounds of tomatoes a year. Within five years, the harvest had increased by 60 percent to 720 million pounds; revenues soared seventeenfold from $47 million in 1960 to over $800 million by the 1990s. Tomatoes had become big business.

Max Lipman
, a European Jewish immigrant who initially settled in New York City, exemplifies this period of expansion. In 1942, he moved to Florida, where he hoped to make a success with a small vegetable wholesale business, buying from local farmers and shipping their produce to northern customers. Within ten years, he had purchased his own land near Immokalee in the southwestern part of the state and was joined in the business by his three sons and three sons-in-law. Playing off the family name, they called their business
Six L’s Packing Company. Four generations later, the company is still controlled by the Lipman family. It grows, packs, and ships fifteen million twenty-five-pound boxes of tomatoes a year from a sprawling warehouselike facility on the outskirts of Immokalee. Six L’s has captured 12 percent of the Florida tomato market, making it the largest of the dozen or so big growers that now raise and ship virtually all Florida tomatoes. Other large companies in the state, like
Pacific Tomato Growers, Procacci Brothers Sales,
East Coast Growers and Packers, and
DiMare Fresh, share almost identical corporate histories to that of Six L’s. Launched by ambitious first- or second-generation immigrants, often from small stalls or push carts in northeastern cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, they expanded rapidly in the second half of the 1900s to become huge companies that, even after several generations, are still run by descendants of the founding family member.