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Book argues Florida tomatoes bred for size, not taste

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By JEFF HOUCK | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 6, 2011

In food writer Barry Estabrook's mind, the perfect tomato flavor is similar to what a wine lover would look for in a well-made red wine. It first must have the right balance of sweetness and acidity. That's the base on which you build the rest of the tomato.

Then comes the aroma. There are 15 chemicals that combine to create that tomato fragrance. Singularly, they don't give off anything resembling that unique bouquet, but together they produce that signature, layered textured nasal twinge where fruitiness plays off spiciness.

He gets these flavors and fragrances when he grows Brandywine variety tomatoes in his backyard in Vermont. So juicy that they have to be nursed to the kitchen counter without bursting, they turn the tomato lover into a bit of a glutton.

"I tend to hog on them until I'm almost sick of them and then don't want to eat them for another eight or 10 months," he said.

Where he doesn't find that flavor and aroma is in grocery store tomatoes grown by Florida's commercial farmers, who produce a crop built more to weight and shipping demands than to flavor needs.

Estabrook takes on Florida's tomato industry, which from October to June produces 90 percent of the country's tomato crop, in his new book "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit." (Andrews McMeel, $19.99)

A founding editor of Eating Well magazine and a freelance writer for Gourmet magazine and The New York Times, Estabrook became fascinated by tomatoes several years ago during a drive through Immokalee, the heart of Florida's tomato country.

Following a truck with a heap of green tomatoes, his car was pelted by what he thought were Granny Smith apples that had fallen off the pile.

"A few flew off and hit my windshield," he said. "They hit the pavement at 50 mph, they didn't splatter. They rolled over to the curb and they were fine. To see it withstand that, I thought, 'How did we get to this?'"

The experience led Estabrook to follow the fruit's path from the field to the grocery. What he found disturbed him.

Florida tomatoes, he discovered, were bred more for girth than flavor. Farmers paid by the pound buy seeds that produce bigger fruit with sturdier flesh that can make the trip thousands of miles from the packing plant to grocery stores across the country.

Picking the fruit while still green and unripe makes for a sturdier tomato but a lackluster product compared to those grown in home gardens. The industrial-produced tomato gets a goosing of ethylene gas to turn its skin from green to red, but it does nothing for the taste.

It doesn't help that Florida, botanically speaking, is an agricultural nightmare of poor soils, hungry bugs, tomato-loving bacteria and wild temperature variations in the winter and spring growing seasons. Those conditions force Florida growers to use eight times more pesticides and herbicides than their California counterparts.

Reggie Brown, manager of the Florida Tomato Committee, and executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange and the Florida Tomato Growers Association, said Estabrook's book was written to promote an agenda of locavorism, or local eating.

"I hope all my friends in the North get used to stone soup, because without Florida tomatoes, that's what they'll be eating in the wintertime," Brown said. "If America wants to eat America-grown produce, Florida is the source of that in the wintertime."

Part of the issue of tomato quality can be attributed to poor handling by consumers. The committee has spent tens of thousands of dollars in the past decade telling people not to refrigerate their tomatoes.

"You can take the best tomato in the world and handle it improperly and it won't taste the way it should," he said.

Researchers at the University of Florida, including one in Wimauma, are working to get flavor back into industrial-grade tomatoes. and Gainesville researchers are going at it from the molecular level to introduce breeding genes back into tomatoes to produce more potent flavor chemicals. A variety they've been working on called the Tasti-Lee has just being introduced.

"It's not going to be as good as one from your garden or the farmer's market, but it's not a disgrace to the name," Estabrook said.

Brown said the tomato industry contributes money for the research being done at the University of Florida.

"Without those dollars for either endowed chairs or annual ongoing research support, there would be no breeding programs anywhere in the country in public domain," Brown said.

Despite the flavor-challenged "orbs" he finds at the supermarket, Estabrook sees reason for hope there, too. It was only a few years ago that there was only one type of tomato sold, usually three to a pack and wrapped in plastic on a little cardboard. Now, partly because of the local, sustainable and organic food movement, such varieties as grape, cherry and ugly ripe tomatoes are common in produce departments.

But there's nothing like a home-grown tomato.

"If you want a great tomato, the closer it's grown to your back door, the better it is," Estabrook said.

jhouck@tampatrib.com (813) 259-7324

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