plus
Wolf Bait, Mary Randolph’s Marmalade,
Pills, Panaceas, and Suspect Syrup,
How Radiator Charlie Beat the Depression,
An Alternative Use for an Incense Burner,
and A Day in Court
A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.
LAURIE COLWIN
“It is difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato,” wrote Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, four out of five people prefer tomatoes to any other homegrown food. American tomato enthusiasm runs so high that gardenless fans have grown them in backyard barrels, patio pots, and window boxes, on apartment balconies, on houseboat decks, and even, in the case of a few intrepid souls, on the roofs of Volkswagens. Over 90 percent of home gardeners plant tomatoes, and the tomato is so popular among consumers that it’s been voted the official state vegetable (or fruit) of Arkansas, Ohio, New Jersey, and Tennessee. It’s quite a turnaround for a plant that most of our ancestors wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole.
The tomato came originally from the Andes of South America, where small-fruited wild forms, described by botanists as weedy and aggressive, still proliferate in a swath of territory across Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador and north into Central America and Mexico. It seems to have been generally ignored on its home turf — the Incas didn’t eat it — but instead was domesticated over a thousand miles to the north, by the Mayas of Central America and southern Mexico.
By the time the Europeans reached the New World, tomatoes in dozens of colors, shapes, and sizes were a staple of native cuisine, eaten in proto-enchiladas, stewed with peppers, beans, and corn, and chopped into a sauce with peppers and ground squash seeds that sounds a lot like an early form of salsa. Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagún, in his sixteenth-century General History of the Things of New Spain, described the mind-boggling array of tomatoes routinely on sale in the Aztec market of Tenochtítlan:
“. . . large tomatoes, small tomatoes, leaf tomatoes, thin tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes, nipple-shaped tomatoes, serpent tomatoes . . . coyote tomatoes, sand tomatoes, those which are yellow, very yellow, quite yellow, red, very red, quite ruddy, ruddy, bright red, reddish, rosy dawn colored.”
Hernando Cortés and company saw tomatoes growing in Montezuma’s Mexican gardens in 1519 and later described them recognizably, though in less than glowing terms: they found the sprawling vines scraggy and ugly. Nonetheless, Cortés may have brought the first tomatoes to Spain, from whence they spread to continental Europe and the Middle East.
The earliest mention of tomatoes in Europe comes from Italian botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544 — apparently a yellow variety, since he later dubbed it pomo d’oro, “golden apple.” (Pomodoro to this day is Italian for a tomato of any color, though most modern European languages call tomatoes by some version of the Aztec tomatl.) Based on morphology, Mattioli perceptively linked the tomato to the eggplant, as well as to a number of more disreputable relatives, among them mandrake, henbane, and the aptly named deadly nightshade — Atropa belladonna, popular among upper-class Romans for permanently eliminating rivals.
The tomato’s association with known poisonous plants was distinctly off-putting and most likely the reason for the three-hundred-year hiatus before it was accepted as an everyday article of European diet. In fact, by mid-sixteenth century, the tomato was ominously nicknamed the wolf peach — “peach” from its luscious appearance, “wolf” from its presumptive poisonous qualities — in analogy to pieces of aconite-sprinkled meat thrown out as bait to destroy wolves. This nickname, Latinized, has persisted as lycopersicon, which figures in Solanum lycopersicon, the modern scientific moniker for the tomato.
Early names for the tomato indicated vast confusion about where the tomato came from and what it was or wasn’t good for. Italians called it the Moor’s apple or the apple of Peru; German herbalist Joachim Camerarius (the Younger) — who rewrote and helpfully beefed up Mattioli — called it the apple of India; and the Iranians called it the Armenian eggplant.
Love Apple
The tomato’s nickname “love apple” may stem from its association with the sinister mandrake, which also bears red or yellow fruits. The hallucinogenic mandrake is traditionally associated with magic and witchcraft — it did Joan of Arc no good at her trial when it was revealed that she carried one around for good luck — and it has a history as an aphrodisiac, possibly because a low dose of it made people woozy and lowered their inhibitions.
The tomato’s poisonous aura was not without its element of truth. Tomatoes belong to the Nightshade family, Solanaceae, known for their manufacture of potentially toxic alkaloids, examples of which include morphine, quinine, nicotine, and strychnine. Compared to such alkaloid superstars, however, tomatine, the major alkaloid in tomatoes, is wimpy. It’s found primarily in tomato leaves and stems, and in the green fruit, from which it disappears as the tomato ripens.
Green tomatoes, however, fried and pickled, have been enjoyed without lethal incident for generations: Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife (1824) includes a recipe for a spicy green tomato marmalade. Researcher Mendel Friedman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture points out that tomatine may actually have substantial health benefits. Studies in animals indicate that tomatine lowers the blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) — a.k.a. “bad cholesterol” — and it inhibits the growth of cancer cells in culture. It also kills bugs. Pre-pesticide nineteenth-century gardeners used broth from cooked tomato foliage to destroy aphids and bedbugs; and tomatine in situ fends off Fusarium wilt, a destructive fungal disease and common bane of tomatoes.
In Europe, the Spaniards and the Italians ate tomatoes first. They were certainly eating them by the late sixteenth century, when John Gerard noted of the “Apples of Love” in his Great Herball: “In Spaine and those hot Regions they use to eat the Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt, and oile” — but, he adds disapprovingly, “they yeeld very little nourishment to the bodie, and the same nought and corrupt.” He admitted that tomatoes were attractive to look at (“of a bright red colour and the bigness of a goose egg or a large pippin”), but smelled awful (“of ranke and stinking savour”) and were probably dangerous to eat.
In similarly reluctant France, agronomist Olivier de Serres wrote in 1600 that “love apples are marvelous and golden” but were primarily grown as ornamentals, noting that “they serve commonly to cover outhouses and arbors.” Richard Bradley, professor of botany at Cambridge University, wrote in 1728 that the tomato “makes an agreeable Plant to look at, but the Fruit of most of them is dangerous” and the leaves and stalks “yield a very strong and very offensive smell.”
Early American colonists followed the lead of their mother country: tomatoes, fetid and potentially death-dealing, are conspicuously absent from early seed lists. The fruits were condemned by ministers and physicians, and the Puritans — perhaps influenced by the designation “love apple” — considered them an abomination, on par with dancing, card-playing, and theatergoing. At least one liberal pastor in early Massachusetts Bay was fired by his congregation for thoughtlessly growing some in his kitchen garden.
Southerners were more amenable to the tomato. According to tomato authority Andrew Smith, the first reference to colonial tomatoes appears in William Salmon’s Botanologia (1710), in which he mentions viewing some while traveling through the Carolinas in the late 1680s. The first evidence that anyone was actually eating them comes from Harriott Pinckney Horry’s Receipt Book of 1770, whose instructions “To Keep Tomatoos for Winter use” involve stewing chopped tomatoes with salt and pepper, then storing them in “pint Potts” topped with melted butter for later use in soups. The fact that there were enough tomatoes around to keep implies that they were prolific inhabitants of at least some Southern gardens.
The Puritans — perhaps influenced by the designation “love apple” — considered tomatoes an abomination, on par with dancing, card-playing, and theatergoing.
The first formal American reference to tomatoes as food plants appears in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, in which he writes that “The gardens yield muskmelons, watermelons, tomatas, okra, pomegranates, figs, and the esculent plants of Europe.” He himself purchased “tomatas” for presidential dinners and planted them annually at Monticello, beginning in June, 1809. Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife lists seventeen recipes for tomatoes, among them gumbo, gazpacho, scalloped tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, eggs and tomatoes, and “Ochra and tomatos.”
The North — possibly in part because the climate was less congenial to tomatoes — remained reluctant to adopt them. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) doesn’t so much as mention a tomato. Tales of tomato failures include that of a vegetable-promoting refugee from Santo Domingo who brought some to Philadelphia in 1798, only to find that nobody liked them much, and an account of an Italian painter who brought some to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802, but couldn’t persuade anyone even to taste them.
Two thousand people assembled to watch Colonel Johnson suffer these awful fates, to the accompaniment of a local firemen’s band playing dirges.
The turning point for the tomato, according to time-honored legend, occurred on September 26, 1820, on the steps of the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson ate, in public and without ill effect, an entire basketful of tomatoes. The colonel, a notorious eccentric, was not a man to be trifled with. During the Revolutionary War, at the tender age of seven, he had patriotically slapped a British officer in the face, and as an adult he habitually dressed in imitation of General Washington in a black suit with impeccable white ruffles, a tri-corn hat, black gloves, and a gold-topped walking stick.
Tomatoes, claimed the colonel, had been eaten by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but the original accounts of this beneficial diet had been lost in the mists of history. The colonel’s personal physician, a Dr. James Van Meeter, took a dim view of the proposed tomato eating and was quoted as saying, “The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis.” Also threatened were aggravated high blood pressure and brain fever. Two thousand people assembled to watch Colonel Johnson suffer these awful fates, to the accompaniment of a local firemen’s band playing dirges. Undaunted, the colonel ate and stalked away, to live in undisputed health to the ripe old age of seventy-nine.
It’s a great story, but the truth seems to be that none of this ever happened. Andrew Smith cites it as “fakelore,” one of our cultural collection of exaggerations, hoaxes, tall tales, and flat-out lies that frankly are just so appealing that we can’t bear to let them go. The tomato-eating colonel, in other words, is in the same boat as George Washington’s cherry tree, Newton’s apple, Nero’s fiddle, and the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.
What does seem to be true is that by the 1820s, even without the help of the probably apocryphal colonel, the tomato had effected a turnaround. Even New Englanders had begun to plant and eat it. Bernard M’Mahon of Philadelphia was selling tomato seeds by 1805, William Booth of Baltimore by 1810, and Philadelphia’s D. Landreth Seed Company by 1825. From New York, Grant Thorburn’s 1832 Catalogue of Kitchen Garden, Herb, Flower, Tree and Grass Seeds not only offered tomato seeds, but — just in case customers didn’t know what to do with the resultant tomatoes — listed two recipes for tomato relish.
Boston’s Hovey & Co., by the 1830s, was touting two kinds of tomatoes (“small and large”), soon thereafter upping the tally to four. By 1835, tomatoes were being grown in the gardens of Maine, and the editor of the Maine Farmer had pronounced them “a useful article of diet” — probably, for Down East conservatives, gushing praise.
Seedsman Robert Buist — a specialist in rare plants and the first to sell poinsettias in America — wrote of the tomato in his Family Kitchen Gardener (1847):
“In taking a retrospect of the past eighteen years, there is no vegetable on the catalogue that has obtained such popularity in so short a period as the one now under consideration. In 1828-9 it was almost detested; in ten years more every variety of pill and panacea was ‘extract of Tomato.’ It now occupies as great a surface of ground as Cabbage, and is cultivated the length and breadth of the country . . . It is brought to the table in an infinite variety of forms, being stewed and seasoned, stuffed and fried, roasted and raw . . . It is also made into pickles, catsup, and salted in barrels for Winter use, so that with a few years more experience, we may expect to see it as an every-day dish from January to January.”
Buist cites four common varieties: the large smooth Red, the Large Red (an enormous ribbed tomato, measuring up to 18 inches in circumference), the pear-shaped, and the cherry-shaped (recommended for pickling). He also mentions offhandedly “several other fancy sorts, generally of a yellow color.”
The upsurge in tomato popularity was due in no small part to the above-mentioned pills and panaceas. Beginning in the 1830s, physicians, both amateur and professional, touted the tomato as a remedy for practically anything, including indigestion, diarrhea, liver and lung diseases, and cholera. Popular nostrums included “Dr. Miles’s Compound Extract of Tomato” and “Dr. Phelps’ Compound Tomato Pills,” neither of which actually contained any form of tomato. Catharine Beecher — sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and an active proponent of education for women — recommended Tomato Syrup for the sick in her Domestic Receipt-Book (1858). It contained tomato juice and sugar, to be bottled for several weeks before use, and, despite Catharine’s staunch advocacy of Temperance Drinks, sounds suspiciously like tomato wine.
The tomato, botanically, is a fruit — that is, an organ that develops from the ovary of the flower and encloses the developing seeds. More specifically, like the avocado and papaya, the tomato is a berry, composed of seeds surrounded by parenchymatous cells. Legally, however, it’s a vegetable.
In 1886, importer John Nix landed a load of West Indian tomatoes in New York, for which the presiding customs agent demanded the payment of a 10 percent tax in accordance with the Tariff Act of 1883, which levied a duty on foreign vegetables. Nix, who knew his botany, protested that the tariff applied only to vegetables; tomatoes, as fruits, should be exempt. The controversy eventually reached the Supreme Court, where, in 1893, Justice Horace Gray decreed the tomato a vegetable:
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of the vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people . . . all these vegetables . . . are usually served at dinner, in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meat, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits, generally as dessert.”
Nix paid up.
The state of Arkansas, which continues to sit on the fence, has declared the tomato both its official state fruit and its official state vegetable.
The garden tomato, once it became a beneficiary of positive medical press, flourished. It was so ubiquitous by the 1850s that an English tourist, stuffed with tomatoes at every turn, commented acidly, “Its very name I now perfectly dread — so constantly, so regularly, does it come up every day, prepared in every imaginable way.” Even tomato-resistant England — where in 1826 John James Audubon had flabbergasted his hosts by eating a whole tomato, raw — had given way by midcentury.
Mrs. Isabella Beeton’s famous Book of Household Management (1859–1861), an immense and invaluable tome that covered everything for the beginning housewife, from the appropriate amount of a butler’s salary to a diagram of the vascular system of plants, recommended tomatoes stewed, baked, and turned into ketchups and sauces. She noted of tomatoes, “In this country it is much more cultivated than it formerly was; and the more the community becomes acquainted with the many agreeable forms in which the fruit can be prepared, the more widely will its cultivation be extended.” Stewed tomatoes, she adds, should be served on a silver vegetable dish.
The common garden tomato of the early nineteenth century was lobed, lumpy, and flattish, and looked something like the tuffet that Miss Muffet perched on in old-fashioned nursery-rhyme books. Its ungainly appearance was one cause of slow tomato acceptance, and as tomatoes became more popular in the kitchen, gardeners began to select for bigger, rounder, more symmetrical, and generally better-looking fruits.
The first major breeding success story was the Trophy tomato, developed in the 1850s by a Dr. Hand of Baltimore County, Maryland, who painstaking crossed a small, smooth-skinned ornamental tomato with a larger, lobed garden variety. The product — smooth-skinned, solid, glossy, and attractively shaped like an apple — was passed on to a Colonel George E. Waring of Rhode Island by Dr. Hand’s son, who had met the colonel at a meeting of the American Jersey Cattle Club.
Waring, the future sponsor of Hand’s tomato, was a scientific farmer and sanitation engineer, the author of Book of the Farm, A Farmer’s Vacation, and Draining for Profit and Draining for Health, and a master marketer. He offered seeds of the Trophy for sale at an outrageous price of 25 cents apiece, while simultaneously offering a prize of $100 “for the heaviest tomato grown from seed purchased directly from me.” The response was overwhelming and soon Waring was announcing that “it is evident that henceforth the Trophy will be the only tomato grown in America.” It wasn’t, but it did dominate tomato patches for decades and figures in the parentage of hundreds of tomato varieties grown today.
By the 1880s seed catalogs routinely offered upwards of a dozen tomato varieties, with numbers increasing annually. In 1885, Vilmorin-Andrieux, in The Vegetable Garden, listed five varieties of ribbed tomatoes; four of round tomatoes, including the Apple-Shaped Red, Apple-Shaped Rose, and Apple-Shaped Purple; two pear-shaped or fig tomatoes; one plum tomato; one cherry tomato (yellow); the curiously shaped King Humbert tomato, flat on four sides and in cross-section nearly square; and the Turk’s-Cap tomato, which bore a topknotlike protuberance in the middle much like that of the turban gourds.
In 1888, W. Atlee Burpee’s Farm Annual offered fifteen large-fruited and seven small-fruited tomato cultivars, among them the pulchritudinous Trophy, as well as the Perfection, Cardinal, Mayflower, and Golden Queen. Also available was the Faultless Early, which, Burpee stated with admirable objectivity, was far from faultless, the fruits being disappointingly rough. By 1901, Burpee felt comfortable declaring that “The tomato now rivals all other vegetables and fruits in popularity, having reached a use beyond that of the potato and apple combined.”
Despite its past and present popularity, the average tomato, nutritionally, is no great shakes. Though plugged as the “oranges of the vegetable garden” for their reputedly high vitamin C content, tomatoes are actually unimpressive. A tomato provides only about one-third as much vitamin C as a green pepper or a cantaloupe half, one-fourth as much vitamin C as a cup of orange juice, and one-fifth as much as a stalk of broccoli. In a comparative study, tomatoes were found to rank sixteenth in overall concentration of ten selected vitamins and minerals, considerably behind such traditional good-for-yous as spinach (#2) and lima beans (#4). (Top of the list was broccoli.) As specific sources of vitamins C and A, tomatoes ranked thirteenth and sixteenth, respectively.
The tomato makes up for its deficiencies in nutritional quality, however, by the quantities in which we consume it. Tomatoes rank high in contribution of nutrients to the American diet simply because we eat a lot of them. Tomatoes, to their credit, are among the foods that weight-watchers can eat of lot of with a clear conscience: they contain 93.5 percent water (only cucumbers and a few leafy vegetables contain more) and log in at a piddling 4 calories per ounce. That means that for the caloric price of a chocolate ice cream cone you can wolf down about three hundred cherry tomatoes.
Nutritionally, it’s also possible to stack the deck by using some care in selecting your tomatoes. Homegrown types, for example, ripened all the way on the vine, have about one-third more vitamin C than the artificially ripened supermarket varieties; and organic tomatoes — those that get their nitrogen from manure and compost — are higher in antioxidants than conventionally grown tomatoes, fed on commercial fertilizers. A study conducted at the University of California at Davis found that organic tomatoes contained nearly twice as much quercetin and kaempferol — flavonoids with potent antioxidant activity — as their conventionally grown cousins.
For the caloric price of a chocolate ice cream cone, you can wolf down three hundred cherry tomatoes.
Some tomato cultivars have also been specifically bred for high nutrient content. The P20 Blue tomato, for example, a cross between a garden red and a wild tomato from Peru, has exceptionally high levels of antioxidant flavonoids — in the form of anthocyanin, which turns the fruit a deep purple-blue. The Doublerich, an early red medium-sized tomato, contains twice the vitamin C of ordinary tomatoes — most of it, as in all tomatoes, concentrated in the jellylike material in the middle, surrounding the seeds. The USDA-developed 97L97 tomato contains forty times more vitamin A than other varieties; and the high-yielding plum-shaped Health Kick tomato is essentially a juicy vegetable vitamin pill, with enhanced levels of vitamins A, B, and C, potassium, iron, and lycopene.
Lycopene, a carotenoid and an antioxidant, is the chemical that makes tomatoes tomato red, as well as putting the color in pink watermelon, pink grapefruit, and red bell peppers. Some recent evidence indicates that lycopene may be a cancer preventive, reducing the risks of prostate and breast cancer. It has also been shown to lower the risks of heart disease and age-related macular degeneration, a retinal condition that can lead to visual impairment or blindness.
To get the most lycopene out of a tomato, you have to cook it. In fact, it’s best if you process your tomatoes at high heat, with a bit of oil thrown in. The reason has to do with the chemical structure of lycopene. In the luscious raw tomato, fresh off the vine, lycopene is in its trans configuration — that is, in the form of long straight skinny molecules that are poorly absorbed by the human digestive tract.
In the boiled and oiled tomato, however, lycopene curls up into an alternative cis configuration, in which state it can be far more easily absorbed. Those who eat their tomatoes as paste or sauce absorb over 50 percent more lycopene than those who eat their tomatoes as nature made them.
It may even function as a low-grade internal sunscreen. Some studies have shown that tomato eating staves off UV-induced skin damage, boosting the levels of essential skin structural proteins — the compounds that keep us supple and smooth — and countering the wrinkly effects of aging.
Today there are literally thousands of tomato varieties. In seed catalogs, these are usually roughly categorized according to size and shape. Beefsteak tomatoes are the biggest of the bunch: garden whoppers, dense, meaty, and favored for tomato sandwiches. The current world record for largest tomato is held by a beefsteak variety: grown by Gordon Graham of Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986, the winner was the size of a goldfish bowl and weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces.
Oxheart tomatoes are large, but not as gargantuan as beefsteaks, and are shaped like ox hearts, although most catalogs understandably prefer to compare them to strawberries. Salad or slicing tomatoes, a large and miscellaneous group, are generally medium-sized juicy types, too slurpy to cook down properly and so best eaten raw. Cherry tomatoes are the round, more or less cherry-sized varieties, also popular for salads, and plum or paste tomatoes are solid, thick-walled oblongs, good for strewing into sauce and soup.
Generally ignored in seed catalogs is the most spectacular success among paste-style hybrids: the so-called “square” tomato, a tough and vaguely blocky fruit, permutations of which are the standard tomatoes of the commercial processing industry. These are the tomatoes you find today in cans on supermarket shelves. Originally developed in the 1950s, the square tomato, officially known by the Star Trekkish designation “Cultivar VF-145,” was designed solely with machines in mind. Mechanical harvesters squished most ordinary tomato cultivars, which tend to be fragile, which led UC Davis crop specialist Gordie “Jack” Hanna to develop the thick-skinned and solid VF-145.
The thugs of the tomato world, these are the fruits you want to grab if you need a projectile in a food fight. California grows about 95 percent of America’s processing tomatoes, and each of us eats — in pizza, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and ketchup — about 71 pounds of them a year.
The world’s largest tomato was grown by Gordon Graham of Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986. It was the size of a goldfish bowl and weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces.
Far more popular among gardeners are heirloom tomatoes, old-fashioned open-pollinated varieties, each at least 50 years in cultivation. Among these are such time-honored favorites as the Green Zebra, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Crimson Cushion, Ponderosa, Black Prince, Arkansas Traveler, and Ivory Egg. We can enjoy these today, just as they were picked off the vine back in the days of FDR’s fireside chats, because of a sexual glitch. Tomatoes, when it comes to reproduction, are suspiciously self-indulgent.
The making of a tomato begins, conventionally enough, with the fertilization of a female ovule by male pollen. Pollen grains land on the sticky surface of the stigma — the smokestack-like tip of the pistil, the female organ containing the ovary — and germinate, extending long tubes that terminate at the ovary. Down these tubes travel a pair of fertilization-bent male nuclei, one of which fuses with the female “egg” to form the seed embryo, the other with an adjacent cell to form the endosperm, future food for the developing infant plant.
Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter
Perhaps the catchiest name among heirloom tomatoes is Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, an enormous pinkish tomato developed by M. C. Byles of West Virginia in the financially dismal days of the Great Depression.
Byles, a mechanic whose knack with blown-out radiators gave him the nickname “Radiator Charlie” (his given name was Marshall Cletis), bred the tomato in his backyard garden. The new tomato was so delicious and so huge, averaging an awesome two and a half pounds a fruit, that Byles was soon selling his seedlings for a dollar apiece to clamoring customers from as much as 200 miles away. The tomatoes — presumably with a little help from radiators — allowed Byle to pay off his mortgage and gave the tomato its name.
Tomato forebears, both wild South American tomatoes and the early Central American cultivated varieties, were cross-pollinated by insects. To facilitate this, the ancestral tomato blossom possessed an extended (exserted) stigma that stuck up well beyond the anther cone, where the (male) pollen is produced. In that elevated position, it was much more likely to contact pollen grains from tomato neighbors. Pollen grains from the home blossom, to hit the receptive target, would have had to defy gravity and fall up.
When translocated to Europe, the abrupt dearth of pollinating insects left the tomato stranded — no bugs means no mates, means no seeds — and its eventual solution was incest. The stigma gradually retracted, to sit well down within the anther cone, which shift in position allowed for self-fertilization; in fact, made it a virtual necessity. It allowed the bugless tomato to survive, but also made it genetically boring. The self-fertilized tomato, having no new genetic material to work with, simply repeats itself. For all their seeming diversity, cultivated tomatoes are pretty much endless iterations of more of the same.
Scientists estimate that garden tomatoes have less than 5 percent of the genetic variation of their wild relatives. At a guess, a mere ten genes control all tomato characteristics available to gardeners today: small to stupendous; round, ribbed, pear, or plum; pink, purple, red, yellow, orange, black, white, or green. In the world of plants, the cultivated tomato is the inbred equivalent of the pharaohs of Egypt, who married their sisters, and an exemplar of all those jokes about redneck family trees. If tomatoes were dogs, they’d have hip dysplasia; and if they were nineteenth-century European royalty, they’d have mental disorders, hemophilia, and funny-looking ears.
When translocated to Europe, the abrupt dearth of pollinating insects left the tomato stranded — no bugs means no mates, means no seeds — and its eventual solution was incest.
Hybrid tomatoes nowadays owe their admirable germplasm in large part to plant geneticist Charles Rick of UC Davis, who spent the bulk of his multi-decade career trekking through the Andes in search of their wild relatives. Rick, who died in 2002 at the age of 87, was famously known on campus for his beard, bicycle, and crumpled army fatigue hat. In the world of tomatoes, he was a legend, singlehandedly preserving seventeen different wild tomato species — among them a tomato of the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, whose seeds frustratingly refused to germinate until Rick discovered that they first had to be partially digested in the gut of the Galapagos tortoise. The result of Rick’s dedication and effort is UC Davis’s Tomato Genetics Resource Center, now a repository of thousands of wild and mutant tomato samples.
Genomics, for all that it makes many on-the-ground jeans-and-trowel gardeners nervous, has done a lot for the tomato. Genes that confer resistance to nearly fifty different tomato maladies — among them nematodes, fusarium wilt, and tobacco mosaic virus — have been found in Rick’s wild tomatoes, and bred into their previously frail and susceptible domestic relatives. Researchers have also identified a potentially valuable salttolerant tomato species on the Galapagos Islands — it grows on the coast, five yards above the high-tide line, and can survive in seawater — and a drought-resistant variety in western Peru, which essentially survives on what little water it gets from fog. A continuing worry among plant geneticists is that such species and traits, many of them already endangered, will vanish before their best features can be incorporated into the domestic gene pool.
Its seeds refused to germinate until they were partially digested in the gut of the Galapagos tortoise.
The tomato is an unusual plant in that cell division in the future fruit is over almost at the moment of fertilization. A tiny, but fully formed, infant tomato can be seen at the base of the flower as soon as it opens. Further development is largely a matter of cell growth — existing tomato cells, rather than multiplying, simply get bigger.
Usually the tomato reaches full size in twenty to thirty days, about half the length of the total ripening period. During this time, the growing fruit accumulates quantities of water, minerals, and starch. New cell-wall material is also laid down, in the form of cellulose — the primary stiffening component in plant cells, digestible only with difficulty by cows and termites, and not at all by people — embedded in an equally indigestible layer of insoluble cement-like pectin. Cellulose and pectin are the main contributors to the green tomato’s crunchy texture.
Once the tomato reaches mature peak size, it passes through a one- to two-week maturation period, during which starch storage continues and a number of developmental changes pave the way for the nitty-gritty of ripening. Mature peak size varies considerably from cultivar to cultivar. These range from huge — among them the Big Boy, the Mammoth Wonder, and the Watermelon Beefsteak, which puts out pink two-pounders — to tiny, with their names reminiscent of miniature poodles, such as Toy Boy, Tiny Tim, Sweetie, and Small Fry.
At whatever size, however, once growth and maturation are complete, ethylene production goes up, along with an abrupt rise in respiration, which, scientists tell us, signals the beginning of the end in the life of a tomato. This respiratory upsurge, termed a climacteric rise, is displayed by a number of fruits — the cantaloupe, honeydew melon, watermelon, peach, pear, plum, and apple, as well as the tomato. (Nonclimacteric fruits, among them oranges and lemons, ripen without an initial respiratory skyrocket.)
About two days after the tomato reaches the mature green stage, the color change, the most obvious of the ripening processes, commences. Initially the fruit lightens in a star-shaped pattern at the blossom end — the “starbreaker” stage, to those in the tomato trade. It then proceeds gradually through yellowish pink to orange to the deep rich red ordinarily associated with the mouthwatering ripe garden tomato.
Chemically, this color change is due to the breakdown of chlorophyll (green) and the synthesis of carotenoids (yellow and red), including the tomato-red lycopene. Yellow tomatoes produce yellow carotenoids, but no red lycopene; orange tomatoes are similarly lycopene-less, but high in the carotenoid beta-carotene, which also puts the orange in carrots and sweet potatoes. White tomatoes degrade chlorophyll normally but synthesize no carotenoids — a behavior governed by an eerie genetic locus termed gh for ghost. There is even a variety of tomato that ripens, but does not degrade chlorophyll and so remains confusingly green. It is called, appropriately, Evergreen.
Along with the color change, ripening involves marked changes in texture and taste. The fruit softens due to the activity of the enzymes pectinesterase and polygalacturonase, which convert the insoluble cell-wall pectins to soluble form. In the unripe fruit, the insoluble pectins act to strengthen cell walls and to bind adjacent cells together; soluble pectins, on the other hand, weaken the whole structure and allow the cells to separate easily when bitten. In the absence of pectinesterase and polygalacturonase, tomatoes would have to be gnawed. There are some tomato mutants that suffer from just that: one of these, designated Neverripe, produces only miniscule amounts of the required enzymes and softens extremely slowly. Understandably, scientists are more interested in it than gardeners are.
Finally, ripening involves the development of true tomato taste, the quality we all fantasize about, but don’t get, from the winterbound Safeway, Shop ‘n Save, or Piggly-Wiggly. Flavor in any fruit is a complicated mix of sugars, organic acids, and many miscellaneous volatile compounds — as many as a hundred in the ripe tomato and more than two hundred in the equally ripe banana.
In the green tomato, most of the sugar is stashed in the storage form of (unsweet) starch. As ripening progresses, the enzyme alpha-amylase — found fulfilling the same function in human saliva — rapidly hydrolyzes this starch, converting it to (sweet) glucose and fructose. Simultaneously, the concentration of (sour) organic acid drops off, and the result, a nice balance of sugar, acid, and volatiles, is what makes up the perfect tomato. Optimal tomato acidity generally ranges around pH 4.0 to 4.5 (pH 7.0 = neutrality), in the same ballpark as red cabbages, onions, and pears. (Lemon juice, in contrast, logs in at a puckering pH of 2.3, and vinegar at 2.5.)
The genetic key to tomato yumminess, according to recent research by Zach Lippman of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and colleagues at Hebrew University in Israel, is a single gene for a chemical called florigen, whose purpose is to tell the growing plant when to stop making leaves and start making flowers. A mutation in one copy of the florigen gene (each tomato plant has two) results in astonishingly higher yields of fruits that are notably sweeter and more scrumptious than those of their nonmutant peers.
Few foods are as delicious as a ripe, fresh-picked garden tomato. Conversely, few are as dreadful as the anemic substitutes found on supermarket shelves in February. Winter tomatoes, which have to be stored and shipped long distances, are picked in the green stage, then exposed to ethylene gas, a process delicately known in the tomato industry as “de-greening.”
Ethylene, primarily a breakdown product of the amino acid methionine, is present normally in fruits and acts much like a hormone, triggering the many activities that lead to natural ripening. It can also lead to unnatural ripening. The ancient Chinese were aware that fruit would ripen more rapidly if placed in a closed chamber with burning incense. In this country, considerably later, orange growers noticed that green oranges placed in rooms with oil heaters rapidly turned into orange oranges. The reason for this color change, at first assumed to be simply heat, was soon discovered to be the presence of ethylene gas, an incomplete oil-combustion product.
Tomatoes are much more resistant to ethylene than are oranges, but will, if determinedly treated, eventually turn reddish. The infamous Walter tomato, developed in Florida where the bulk of U.S. winter tomatoes are grown, was selected for its cooperative uniform response to gassing and its resilience to travel. (It’s a tough tomato; you can play catch with it.) In the chilly off-season, it’s better than nothing — but it’s also proof that, just like trees, only God can make a tomato.
To Sprawl or Not to Sprawl
In the absence of genetic manipulation, growers agree that the best-tasting tomatoes ripen on the vine — preferably on indeterminate vines. Indeterminate plants are lanky sprawlers that grow steadily throughout the gardening season, grinding to a halt only with the advent of unseasonably cold weather. The larger size and higher leaf count of indeterminate plants mean more sugar production and sweeter fruit. Many heirloom tomato varieties are indeterminate, which may explain their reputation for tastiness.
Determinate tomatoes, in contrast, are bushy, compact, and tidy, usually growing no more than three feet tall. This habit is governed by a specific gene designated sp (self-pruning) which appeared out of the blue as a spontaneous mutation in Florida in 1914.
The first genetically engineered crop ever sold in American markets was a tomato. Called the Flavr Savr, the tomato was created by the California company Calgene and introduced in 1994 as an improved alternative to the standard cardboardlike, picked-green-and-gassed product ordinarily available to consumers in winter.
The new tomato had a gene, inserted via bacterial carrier, that blocked the production of polygalacturonase, an enzyme essential for softening of the fruit during ripening. In the absence of this enzyme, the Flavr Savr could be allowed to ripen naturally on the vine — thus developing a normal tomato’s battery of flavor molecules — but would still be tough enough for shipping. Though deemed both safe and nutritious by the FDA, the Flavr Savr didn’t make the cut with consumers, and transgenic tomatoes — in a flood of hype about mutants, monsters, and Frankenstein — vanished.
Today, rather than genetic engineering, tomato experts favor “smart breeding,” a technique that combines genetic analyses of plants for desirable traits with traditional crossbreeding.
Fruit is not an end in itself, but a tomato plant’s clever way of making more tomato plants — a fancy mechanism for seed dispersal. Within each tomato are 250 to 300 tiny seeds, which weigh in at about 5,000 to the ounce. These seeds develop most rapidly during the second half of the tomato maturation period, the one- to two-week pause between the attainment of full growth and the onset of ripening. During this time, the seed embryo reaches full size and the seed coat develops and hardens.
Animal-assisted seed dispersal, of the sort aspired to by the tomato, is known as endozoochory, “seeds inside animals,” or what one researcher terms the “Jonah syndrome.” Here, the seeds are covered by an appealing coat of fleshy food and, at some point during the eating process, are spat out, spilled, or voided (a.k.a. dispersed) by a hungry and helpful animal. For this dispersal to be effective the seeds must escape wholesale digestion or destruction by overenthusiastic eaters, a problem the tomato gets around by producing immense numbers of small seeds. Some inevitably spill during feeding and go on to reproduce the species, and those that are actually swallowed possess coats tough enough to resist the fatal activity of the digestive tract enzymes. By the seed dispersal stage, that’s it for the tomato — until, of course, gardening time next year.
The correct tomato pronunciation, linguists believe, is to-mah-to, from the sixteenth-century Spanish tomate. The word picked up its o in eighteenth-century England, where the insular English believed that all Spanish words ended that way, but retained its short a.
Around here, though, we eat to-may-toes. After all these years of phonetic error, it’s just too blasted late to call the whole thing off.