1. yield (in pounds per acre)
2. viscosity or thickness (which governs how much of a product can be made from a pound of the given tomato’s paste)
3. amount of soluble and insoluble solids in the fruit
4. firmness (ability to withstand rough handling during mechanical harvesting)
5. uniformity of color
6. disease resistance
7. heat and cold tolerance (so as to continue producing at the early and late ends of the season)
I also asked these experts if any other characteristics were important, if we’d left any out. “No,” said one. “It does get to be end product-driven.”
No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavor and nutritional content. These were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning.
For the modern, corporate food industry—whose needs these university horticulturists’ research serves—how a food item tastes and whether or not it is nourishing for human beings appear not to be issues. They aren’t even discussed.
A quick survey of various websites where university horticultural researchers report the results of field trials of plant varieties gave the same result. There were reports of trials at a number of universities, mostly in the south and midwest. The typical list of qualities tested for in fresh market tomatoes included “yield, earliness, fruit size, fruit resistance to cracking, firmness, acidity, and plant tolerance/resistance to diseases.”18 Flavor and nutritional value were almost never mentioned.
From every indication, if a tomato variety were developed that was perfectly uniform in shape and size, that grew fast in both heat and cold, that ripened at exactly the same moment every season, that had an outer layer as tough as brake lining, and that yielded massive amounts per acre–but which had no flavor whatsoever, and absolutely no nutritional value–the industry would likely welcome it like the Second Coming of Christ. And consumers, you and I, would be expected to buy the things or just bloody well go hungry.
Of course, even if we bought them and ate them, we would still be “going hungry,” because we’d have received very little nutrition.
But hey, that’s capitalism, eh?
As for flavor, I wasn’t just imagining that the fresh market supermarket tomatoes I’d bought were less tasty than those I’d eaten in Italy, or taken from my home garden years ago. According to the textbook Economic Botany: Plants in Our World:
Tomatoes to be sold as fresh grocery store produce are picked before they are mature or when they are only beginning to turn colorful and then are ripened at the time of selling. Fruits that have been picked green are tough because of a lack of the proper ethylene-generated maturation, or they are mushy because the intercellular matrix deteriorates. They also lack the sugar that accumulates very rapidly at the peak of ripening when tomatoes are left on the vine....Ethylene [is] a plant hormone that is responsible for the series of events that lead to the final color change, softening, and flavor production characteristic of natural ripening. 19
So, not only were my store tomatoes deliberately bred to be tough to withstand the bouncing of long range transport, they were rendered still tougher by picking them when green. Tough and tasteless.
By “ripened at the time of selling,” the textbook was referring to the practice of artificially gassing the green tomatoes with ethylene during or just after transport in special “ripening rooms.” This gives them a suddenly red color, making them look good on the shelf, but doesn’t appear to have the same effect as natural ripening in terms of producing flavor and texture.
Refrigeration during transport has an even more negative effect. According to a USDA Agricultural Research Service study of the effects of refrigeration on tomato flavor, “chilling the fruit reduced ripe aroma, sweetness, and general tomato flavor, while increasing sourness and reducing sweetness. This was supported by measured changes in aroma compounds, sugars, and acids.”20
Those little red tennis balls had begun to educate me. They had also begun to really annoy me. I wanted to know more about the system that was doing this. I wasn’t about to take it lying down.
Neither should you. And you don’t have to. There are alternatives, which we will discuss in later chapters, after some of the other aspects of our modern, corporate North American food system have been described.
THE DECLINE OF THE TOMATO ISN’T THE ONLY tragic story in the modern supermarket, nor are the USDA’s nutrient tables the only source documenting what’s happening. A tour through the recent literature on food in the U.S., Canada, and Britain, followed by a walk through just about any corporate chain-owned grocery store, produces a horrific picture of losses so steep, and continuing at such a rate, that it is not an exaggeration to speak–literally–of the coming end of food.
Start with some of the most obvious losses, and their potential consequences in terms of human health.
On July 6, 2002, the Toronto Globe and Mail began publishing a series of articles on food, including one by reporter Andre Picard, who wrote:
Fruits and vegetables sold in Canadian supermarkets today contain far fewer nutrients than they did 50 years ago. Vital vitamins and minerals have dramatically declined in some of our most popular foods.
Take the potato, by far the most consumed food in Canada. The average spud has lost 100 percent of its vitamin A, which is important for good eyesight; 57 percent of its vitamin C and iron, a key component of healthy blood; and 28 percent of its calcium, essential for building healthy bones and teeth.
It also lost 50 percent of its riboflavin and 18 percent of its thiamine. Of the seven key nutrients measured, only niacin levels have increased.... The story is similar for 25 fruits and vegetables that were analyzed [in a Globe and Mail, CTV study].1
Picard’s numbers were based on food tables supplied by the Canadian government, but were fairly close to what the USDA tables were showing. In fact, some of the Canadian data was taken originally from the USDA tables. What Picard was saying was generally true for the U.S. as well.
It was also true in Britain. There, researcher Anne-Marie Mayer published a study in the British Food Journal, a respected scholarly source for nutritionists and food specialists. She wanted to answer the question: “Has the nutritional quality (particularly essential mineral content) of fruits and vegetables changed this century during the period of changes in the food system and the modernization of agriculture?”2 To get her answer, she looked at the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the USDA food tables, The Chemical Composition of Foods, for 1936 and 1991, and compared the contents of 20 vegetables and fruits. Her results:
There were significant reductions in the levels of calcium, magnesium, copper and sodium in vegetables, and magnesium, iron, copper, and potassium in fruits. The greatest change was the reduction in copper levels in vegetables to less than one-fifth of the old level. The only mineral that showed no significant differences over the 50- year period was phosphorus. 3
SMALL NUMBERS, BIG CONSEQUENCES
Numbers. Most supermarket shoppers are not math majors, nor experts in statistics. And