Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
called a beefsteak. Nobody liked any of them very much, but almost everyone accepted
the situation as the way things were. If you wanted a good tomato, you had to grow your
own.
One group that wasn't complaining was the tomato farmers, who were doing a very
good business. In 1994 fresh tomatoes were almost a $1 billion industry, and the farmers
believed they had it all figured out. They had a good run of plants that resisted most com-
mon pests. They picked their fruit rock hard so it was practically indestructible. (At the
time, a news photo of an overturned tomato truck showed a lot of twisted metal but most
of the fruit intact.) When they needed to sell some tomatoes, they would gas them to some
semblance of red. And best of all, they had a guaranteed market: it is almost unthinkable
that a fast-food hamburger or taco would not have some tomato on it. In fact, the food
service industry uses roughly half of all the fresh tomatoes grown in the United States.
To get a full understanding of the situation as it then stood it is worthwhile to linger for a
moment on the subject of "mature-green" and "vine-ripe." Although it might not be appar-
ent to the consumer (since neither type tastes much like the tomato we remember), there's
more to the difference between them than simply the color at which they are picked. They
actually come from different types of plants, are grown in different ways and are some-
times sold to different people.
Even today mature-green tomatoes make up the bulk of the fresh tomato harvest -
somewhere around 75 percent. They are picked from plants that are called "determinate,"
which means the vines grow only to a certain point and then stop. Determinate tomatoes
grow on bushy plants that sprawl whichever way they will. Farmers don't need to worry
about training them because they'll only get so big. Because of the way the plants are
structured, harvesting them is a bit of a chore: the pickers have to sort through the
foliage to find the fruit. This means that the fields are harvested in only one or two
sweeps. Whenever a certain percentage of the tomatoes starts to show some color, almost
everything gets picked. And when growers refer to "showing color," they're not seeing
red. The first pale blush of green to cream is enough. As a result of this mass approach to
harvesting, a good many of the tomatoes are significantly underripe when they are picked.
This is not much of a problem for fast-food places, where tomatoes are used mainly as a
source of symbolic color. And it even works for consumers in the winter, when most of us
are so desperate for tomatoes that we'll take almost anything we can get. The majority of
these tomatoes are grown in Florida, which is about the only place that can grow tomatoes
outdoors at that time of year. During the summer, when it's too hot to grow in Florida,
mature-green tomatoes come from the Central Valley of California.
