Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
now has been aimed at solving what seemed to growers and shippers to be more important
flaws.
At its most basic, the biggest challenge with tomatoes is the same one faced by so
much of agriculture - to produce a fragile, temperamental product on an industrial scale.
By nature tomatoes are thin-skinned and late-maturing, to say nothing of being prone to
a wide array of diseases and insects. That we have such an insatiable demand for them -
cut up in salads, sliced onto hamburgers, chopped up in salsas - is a cruel irony. It would
be a lot better for everyone involved if those culinary functions could be filled by, say, an
orange or a zucchini, any fruit or vegetable that isn't always poised on the edge of self-de-
struction.
But we must make do with the fruits and vegetables that we have, not the ones we may
wish we had. And up to now, quite frankly, taste has been the least of anyone's concerns.
As a result, breeders have developed tomato strains that resist all manner of cankers and
wilts, without paying much attention to choosing ones with great flavor. And farmers and
shippers still insist on picking fruit at the very earliest signs of impending ripeness to en-
sure that the tomatoes survive the trip to the grocery store. There hasn't even been any
really reliable research that would clear up the most troublesome basic questions regard-
ing tomato flavor: How much does it improve for every extra day the fruit is allowed to
hang on the vine? How does this improvement work? Are there steps growers can take
- such as using specific fertilizers or withholding water before harvest - that will make a
difference in flavor?
One vital piece of the tomato quality puzzle involves steps you can take yourself. Cold
temperatures wreak havoc with tomato flavor. The exact mechanism of how this works is
still being studied, but without question it does happen. Temperatures below 60 degrees
reduce the aroma-creating volatiles in the fruit. This change is quick and irreversible. If
a case of tomatoes is even stacked next to a cooler for a day, that can be enough to ruin
them. Tomato growers have been working diligently for the last several years to get that
word out up and down the supply chain, but it is still not uncommon to walk into a grocery
store and see tomatoes stored in the refrigerator. If this should happen to you, there is only
one solution: turn right around and walk back out. That may not be much, but it is as close
to a sure and simple fix as exists in the tomato world.
