The Way God Intended

I first heard about Heirloom Tomatoes a few months ago on the radio. I finally found some in the grocery store today and decided to try one. What is an Heirloom Tomato, you ask? Well, it's the same thing our great-grandparents called a Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). What we call tomato hadn't been invented in a lab yet.

Let's back up. Tomatoes, like most of our favorite fruits and vegetables, came from South America. The Spanish started shipping them back to Europe in the 1500s. The English weren't as impressed as the Spanish. The first mention of tomatoes in North America came from a 1710 book written by a kook named William Salmon. In southern plantations, tomatoes were grown as ornamental plants until the mid-1800s because most people assumed they were poisonous.

Germans, around this time, still believed in werewolves. A plant native to Europe, the Nightshade (Belladonna), supposedly attracted werewolves. When the humble tomato plant began to proliferate through Europe, Germans thought it looked suspiciously similar to Nightshade. It just grew bigger fruit. So, they called it a Wolf Peach, which rendered into Latin, gives us the species name lycopersicum.

It's not really a peach, though. It's actually a berry.

Before the Great Depression, tomatoes grew in a variety of sizes and colors. Commercial growers found them difficult to ship long distances because the size and shape varied from tomato to tomato and the soft flesh and skin damaged easily. Old school tomatoes also began ripening from the bottom, giving them green shoulders.

Sometime before the 1930s, a tomato grower noticed a random mutation in his tomatoes: they ripened uniformly, turning red all over at the same time. Scientists thought this was pretty nifty so they worked to isolate the mutant gene. In a Fargo, North Dakota experimental farm in 1930, scientists produced the first cultivar of tomatoes with this uniform ripening gene. By the 1940s, this gene had been bred into all commercial tomatoes. Commercial growers even began selling potted seedlings so the casual gardeners could grow them in their backyards.

The modern tomato has been genetically modified to produce all-red fruit that comes in a uniform size and shape and a tough skin to resist damage during shipment. Whether you buy tomatoes in the produce section of your local grocery store, in a seed packet at Lowes, or in a pot in the Wal-Mart Garden Center, you're buying a genetic mutant. An Aberration.

Here's how a tomato makes it to your supermarket. Are you ready? A migrant worker in Florida picks the berry while it's still green. The farm then sprays the tomatoes with Abscisic Acid, a plant hormone that inhibits ripening so they stay green all the way to the store. The tomatoes are kept in cold storage and trucked all over the US. When they arrive at their penultimate destination, they're sprayed with a different plant hormone called Ethylene which makes them rapidly ripen. Except they don't actually ripen, they just change color. So what you put in your grocery basket is a green tomato that looks red.

Recently, scientists, curious about this ubiquitous mutation, ran some experiments or whatever it is scientists do and discovered what we've all suspected for years. The genetic mutation that allowed tomatoes to uniformly ripen also affected the synthesis of sugar and other chemicals responsible for the taste and smell of tomatoes. That's why grocery store tomatoes taste like nothing.

Enter the Heirloom Tomato. Starting around the 70s, small tomato producers began collecting and preserving tomato lines that had been spared the mutation. These cultivars, since they had been handed down from generation to generation on family farms, were called Heirloom Tomatoes. Since they don't have the mutation, they begin ripening from the bottom up, so you can find them with green shoulders. Each cultivar has a distinct flavor and color determined by the soil and climate. (Consequently, the last climate and soil type in which you'd rationally want to grow a tomato is the climate and soil type found in Florida, where most of our tomatoes are grown.)

I found some at Schnuck's and bought one.

I believe I brought home a Cherokee Purple, known for irregular pockets of seeds, black flesh, and a smokey flavor.

It definitely tasted sweeter and more robust than any tomato I've had. It had what I would agree is a smokey flavor and this sort of peppery aftertaste. Aine doesn't like tomatoes. Since this tasted More Tomato than even Romas, she pretty much hated it. I, on the other hand, have been ruined. After this, aside from the canned tomatoes I buy to make salsa, I don't see the point in buying anything other than an Heirloom Tomato. It was super duper.