And that was the last straw, or tennis ball, or tomato.
My attention was well and truly fixed. As Sherlock Holmes would put it, the game—in this case the berry fruit—was afoot. Mixed metaphor number two.
A SHELTERED LIFE
By way of explanation here, so you won’t think of me as a fanatic: At the time I met these rubbery North American supermarket tomatoes I’d just returned from six years of living in Italy, where the tomato is a kind of dietary deity. Although supermarkets exist in places like Rome or Milano, they—or at least their fresh produce sections— haven’t really caught the average food-worshiping Italian’s fancy. Most people still buy fruit and vegetables in open, neighborhood farmers’ markets, where produce is displayed in mind-boggling variety under colorful awnings, out in the sunny piazza. The quality is . . . mama mia! Who can describe?
Before that our family lived on a small farm in rural Canada, where we raised our own home-garden tomatoes, picked them off the vine, and ate them fresh in the field.
It had been a sheltered life. This episode with the tennis balls was a shock.
On Saturday, I went back to the supermarket and gave the tomato shelf a closer look. There were three bins of tomatoes: one labeled “field grown,” another “greenhouse,” and a third full of elongated pasta tomatoes. The greenhouse tomatoes looked so exactly alike—all the same size, perfectly round and all exactly the same, uniform red color—that it was almost unreal, like maybe they were wax tomatoes cast from the same mold for decorative display.
But they weren’t wax.
The pasta tomatoes also looked exactly like each other: same size, same shape, precisely the same color, like tiny Italian soldiers in red uniforms.
Only the field tomatoes had any differences. They were the same size and shape, but some had a slight hint of yellow or green around the stem scar, where others were totally red. I bought some of the greenhouse and some of the field tomatoes, and took them home.
Both types were hard, and by now I knew better than to hope for any changes. I cut them up for salad, the knife crunching through their tough outer walls (what botanists call the pericarp wall). I was surprised by how thick these were, and went for a ruler: more than three-eighths of an inch. In a later trip, to a different supermarket, I found one with walls just short of half an inch thick. The greenhouse tomatoes tended to be thinner.
When I ate them … well, let’s just say they tasted vaguely like tomatoes.
But comparing them to what the Romans eat, or to what our garden used to produce every summer, was like comparing carbonated cat pee to a rich, foaming Guinness stout. They were from a different planet. A hard, red, rather bleak planet.
Why? What had happened to these tomatoes?
It took some searching—through libraries, the Internet and the horticulture faculties of several universities—but eventually a story came together: the story of the slow ruination not only of the North American tomato, but of most of the good, tasty, nourishing food of all kinds that Americans and Canadians once ate, and took for granted.
But more on that later. Let’s stick with tomatoes for now.
FOOD TABLES
Periodically, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) publishes a set of tables, generally referred to as “food tables,” although different versions have had different formal titles. These list a wide variety of foods, from meat, fish, and grain to fruits and vegetables, giving measures of their actual content in terms of vitamins, minerals, protein, and other substances that can play a part in the human diet. Researchers and specialists in nutrition refer to them frequently as a base measure for making general comparisons.
The first of these was put out by the USDA’s Dr. W. O. Atwater, a pioneering food researcher assisted by fellow scientist Charles D. Woods, under the title The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials (1896)1. This early work, completely superseded by later research, looked at a relatively small number of foods, and tested for an even smaller number of ingredients. Only six measures in it compare roughly with later, much more detailed tables for untreated (namely, not peeled, canned, or otherwise processed) tomatoes. As Atwater’s sample sizes may have been different than those used today, accurate comparison is actually impossible.
Later USDA publications, however, generally give figures for either “100 grams of edible portion” of the food in question, or for the nutrients in one pound of a given food item. Thus, they can be compared. And comparisons–even between fairly recent tables–are more than enlightening. They are shocking.
The most recent set of tables, posted on the USDA website for 2002, is titled USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 15.2 Comparing the figures in it with those given in USDA Agriculture Handbook No. 8: Composition of Foods, published in 1963,3 shows that 100 grams of today’s average red, ripe whole tomato contain 22.7 percent less protein than a tomato would have if purchased by American shoppers in the year President John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.
The main reason for including tomatoes in our diets, of course, is not for their raw protein value, but because they are normally supposed to be rich in vitamins A and C, in potassium, phosphorus, iron, and calcium, as well as in the possibly cancer-suppressing lycopene. Lycopene is a “carotenoid,” the group of yellow, orange, and red plant pigments that give carrots, watermelons, and tomatoes their colors. Some carotenoids are “precursors” of vitamin A, which is to say they help produce it as a result of chemical reactions in human organs like the liver. While lycopene isn’t an actual vitamin A precursor, it is a powerful antioxidant that “seems to inhibit the reproduction of cancer cells.”4 Unfortunately, the USDA food tables don’t measure lycopene.
They do measure vitamin A, however, a nutrient which is needed by the human body to maintain good eyesight as well as normal sexual reproductive health and body growth. And they measure vitamin C, required to prevent a variety of diseases, from scurvy to the common cold, to control stress, to maintain normal arteries, and to help heal cuts and wounds.
Tomatoes were once among the best sources of these vitamins. But 100 grams of today’s fresh tomato contain 30.7 percent less Vitamin A and 16.9 percent less Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) than its 1963 counterpart. It also has fully 61.5 percent less calcium (required to maintain strong bones and teeth), 11.1 percent less phosphorus, 9 percent less potassium, 7.97 percent less niacin, 10 percent less iron and 1 percent less thiamin.
And those are only the losses since 1963, about half a person’s lifetime. If today’s values are compared with those for earlier years, the story is often worse. The amount of iron in 100 grams of raw red tomato today is 10 percent less than in 1963, but fully 25 percent less than in 1950, when the real-life counterparts of the characters in television’s M*A*S*H were busy fighting the Korean War.5 The amount of vitamin A, measured in International Units (IUs), is 43.3 percent less than in 1950. How much has been lost since 1930, or earlier? No one can say. But a trend in losses of key nutrients is obvious.
Of course, not every substance found in fresh tomatoes has diminished. Two, in particular, have posted spectacular increases since 1963. The amount of fat (lipids) has climbed by 65 percent, while sodium–the basis of common table salt (sodium chloride, or NaCl) –has leaped upward by an astounding 200 percent.
These increases and decreases are not isolated, but can have a kind of domino effect, mutually reinforcing each other. For example, sodium (as sodium chloride), has for years been considered the primary factor responsible for high blood pressure. As the authors of Understanding Nutrition, a basic college textbook for the health sciences, put it:
Some individuals respond sensitively to excesses in salt intake and
experience high blood pressure. People most likely to have a salt sensitivity
include those with chronic renal disease, diabetes, or hypertension, African-Americans, and