Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
smugly, You won't find that in the supermarket. By definition, heirloom tomatoes are
open-pollinated, as opposed to hybrid, so the seeds grow true to the parents. (Although
there is no formal age limit, it is generally agreed that an heirloom variety must have been
around for at least three generations to qualify.)
You can usually recognize heirloom tomatoes first by their imperfections. They are
plainly and outspokenly old-fashioned. They tend to have unusual shapes and frequently
odd colors. They wear their wrinkles and blemishes as signs of character. Amid the perfect
uniformity of the modern produce section, they stick out like the Queen Mum at a fashion
shoot.
But their appeal is undeniable - and profitable. When most tomatoes sold for less than
$2 a pound, heirlooms went for as much as $6. And even at those prices, there was no
shortage of buyers. At some high-end groceries, heirloom tomatoes became the single
best-selling summer produce item in terms of dollar volume. Ironically, most of these heir-
looms had at one time or another been discarded by commercial growers because of their
cosmetic blemishes, thought to discourage shoppers, and because they have much thinner
skins that puncture easily, leading to rapid spoilage.
First the heirlooms caught on at farmers' markets. When chefs snapped them up and
bought as many as they could, the cult of the heirloom tomato was born. Suddenly, every
tomato in every fancy restaurant had a provenance that was spelled out in excruciating de-
tail on the menu. High-end produce managers weren't sleeping. They began to seek them
out, too. To be sure, these tomatoes rated hardly a blip on the radar screen of the commer-
cial tomato world.
No one keeps statistics on them, but today there are almost certainly fewer than 300
acres of heirloom tomatoes grown in all of California (as opposed to more than 30,000
acres of fresh tomatoes total). Still, they have had an influence that far outweighed their
actual dollar worth. Not only did they reinforce the message to produce marketers that the
old variety paradigms weren't working, but they also prompted some supermarket chains
to change their distribution patterns.
The industry standard is to have all fresh tomatoes delivered to a central warehouse,
where they are sorted and from which they are shipped to individual stores, a process that
can take two or three days. (This is for upscale groceries. Most tomatoes go through even
more hands between farm and market.) Because heirloom tomatoes were such a premi-
um product, some markets began allowing individual farmers to deliver their tomatoes
directly to the stores. This allows an extra two or three days of ripening before harvest,
