"I can't count the number of times someone has tasted one of my tomatoes or melons for the first time and said, 'This brings back memories of my childhood,'" says Amy Goldman, author of The Heirloom Tomato and two other books on heirlooms, one squash and the other melons. Their response is because the flavor is so refreshingly robust and vibrant.
The flavor of Amy's tomatoes is being compared to the gas-ripened, pinkish, mealy, and bland tasting industrial tomatoes we all know from iceberg lettuce salads and from what is available in supermarkets. The tomatoes people are referencing from their childhoods, if they are old enough, are freshly picked, fully red and ripe, juicy, and lusciously sweet yet slightly acidic.
This latter tomato is what I call the Slow Food tomato, because the Slow Food movement is about bringing the pleasure of food back into our lives in a way that also benefits the planet.
What better way to understand how Slow Food works than to look at the tomato? I've adapted here a section from the chapter on variety in True Food: 8 Simple Steps to a Healthier You, my new book with Melissa Breyer and Wendy Gordon. As you read, you'll begin to see how your choice of tomato makes a vital difference for the planet as well as your palette.
A Tale of Two Tomatoes
Tomato Seed One - F1 Hybrids
When you sit down to eat a salad with a tomato that you bought at a supermarket, chances are that the tomato was grown from an F1 hybrid seed, a seed that is not found in nature.
Breeders make F1 hybrids by first "selfing" plants -- making them reproduce by using the plant's own pollen - and then crossing two highly inbred parent lines. The resulting seeds yield uniformity, a trait desirable for industrial farms, which grow thousands of acres of one kind of food. The seeds are bred for large-scale food production, prizing yield per acre, uniformity of color and consistency, and pest resistance. Second generation seeds tend to be sterile, or do not breed true: Farmers have to buy new seeds every year, posing a serious problem for poor countries.
Because the tomato you bought is most likely identical to the tomato you will buy next month, you will not be getting a variety of nutritional benefits, as you would if you were eating different tomato types. Lastly, if all industrial farms around the country are growing F1 tomato plants, they are forcing out of the market the thousands of diverse tomato varieties that have, over the course of centuries, adapted to withstand drought, freezing, and blight.
In modern times, when difficult blights and fungi attack their F 1 hybrid plants, industrial farms use huge amounts of pesticides. Yet pesticide- and fungicide-resistant strains of plant diseases are developing all the time, making this a vicious cycle that poisons our food supply and the environment.
Tomato Seed Two- Open-Pollinated, Heirloom
To find a tomato or other plant that is genetically unique you most likely would have to go to a farmers' market or grow your own. Food grown from heirloom and open-pollinated seeds has now become that obscure. But the seed that grew the tomato you went out of your way to buy or grow is a cultivar that came from a seed passed down through countless generations. And at a farmers' market, you may be able to buy four or five tomatoes from different gene pools, giving you nutritional variety and a variety of tastes and flavors as well.
Open-pollinated seeds are constantly being modified in nature because the plants cross-pollinate with others in the locale -- called serendipitous crossing -- passing genes back and forth. The genes have been fine-tuned over centuries to a variety of climate and soil conditions, as well as adapting to blights and pests, making the plants uniquely capable of staving off a variety of threats.
It's also selection of favorable traits by generations of farmers and gardeners that has led to the domestication of all our major food crops. Seeds survived in this way for millennia before chemical sprays and fertilizers existed. Modern farmers who caretake heirloom seeds almost always grow them organically. Whereas often an heirloom seed will be native to a region, heirlooms do not necessarily imply native species -- immigrants have brought their seeds to the United States for years, and the seeds have been domesticated.
Alice Waters, owner and founder of Chez Panisse, notes in an interview with Sally Quinn for The Washington Post, that "the mantra of Slow Food is 'good, clean, and fair'." For her meals she finds food in season, when there is an aliveness and ripeness to it, and eats it very simply. I'm sure she wouldn't mind if I added "true" to the type of food she finds, as she wrote the Foreword to True Food, and I know she'd be voting for the heirloom tomato as part of her delicious Slow Food menus. If you garden, pick the heirloom tomato when you choose your tomato seeds and plants this year!
Follow Annie B. Bond on Twitter: www.twitter.com/anniebbond
Slow Food International | good, clean and fair food
Slow Food - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The bottom line is that we all need to vote with our dollars. Buy farmers market produce and organic. Grow your own tomatoes. I do, and it's easy. (Although this foggy summer weather isn't ideal.)
You know this makes me think that if only we were all better educated about the really important stuff that impacts our bodies, mental health, environment, et al -- and then were able to put that knowledge into action -- life would be much more ideal.
After all, in democracies, the consumer, by virtue of his/her spending, rules. We need to learn how to spend our money on the the things that nourish life, and let all the other stuff wither away.
Yep.
http://ozarkhomesteader.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/selecting-seed-a-quick-guide-to-tomatoes/
Heirlooms in general tend to have more flavor because they grown on plants not bred for yield. More leaf per fruit means more flavor. And that's a good thing. But I challenge anyone to show me science that indicates heirlooms are substantially healthier than hybrids. Hybrids are bred to travel better so that you can eat them in the winter at a distance from where they were grown.
That said, I have also tasted incredibly delicious hybrid tomatoes. The Campari, a large cherry developed by a Dutch seed company is a good commercial tomato. The best tomatoes I ever ate were hybrid Golden Honeybunch growing in Baja California on farms selling to Del Cabo Farms.
To suggest that only hybrids are healthy is to believe that we were healthier in our original prelapsarian state of nature, which is a beautiful and completely bogus idea.
Let's celebrate heirlooms for their (apparent) diversity, their flavor and the fun of it. But please, don't fetishize. The narcissism of small differences has no place in the garden.
Arthur Allen - artnews@earthlink.net
Author, RIPE: The Search for the Perfect Tomato (Counterpoint Press)
They are all members of the nightshade family, and contain a variety of toxins put there by nature to discourage predators (including humans) from eating them.
The toxins include the following: solanine, calcitriol, nicotine, and capsaicin.
For some people, symptoms from excess consumption of the various nightshades (not just tomatoes) might include pain (including osteoarthritis, muscle and bone pain), calcification of the arteries and kidneys, bone spurs, scleroderma, gastrointestinal and neurological disorders (including nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, burning of the throat), cardiac dysrhythmia, headache and dizziness, hallucinations, loss of sensation, paralysis, fever, jaundice, dilated pupils, hypothermia, delayed healing, birth defects, asthma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma and stomach cancer.
To see if you are sensitive to nightshades, an elimination diet for several weeks might be a good idea.
For a review of the subject, see:
http://www.westonaprice.org/Nightshades.html
For a further discussion and references on what nature did intend humans to eat, see "The Wellness Project."
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com
I have been procrastinating on starting a vege garden and promised this weekend I would do it. Your article served as a timely reminder of my promise.
Many thanks for a great article.
Peace and much love
Lara Jane
Founder of the Ultimate Lifestyle Project
http://ultimatelifestyleproject.com/spiritual-quotient/
There is nothing like fresh lettuce from your garden. It actually has a taste, unlike lettuce from the supermarket.
Want kids to eat more vegetables? Try planting grape tomatoes. When ripe, they are as sweet as candy. You can pop them in your mouth like chocolates.
Carrots? Also sweet from the garden.
And nothing crunches like a garden cucumber.
I can eat off my lettuce for weeks by just removing a leaf or two from the various plants and letting the heads keep growing. Delicious.
Someday I hope to get a chicken. Then I'll have fresh and tasty eggs too.