How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  Nix paid up.

  The state of Arkansas, which continues to sit on the fence, has declared the tomato both its official state fruit and its official state vegetable.

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  The garden tomato, once it became a beneficiary of positive medical press, flourished. It was so ubiquitous by the 1850s that an English tourist, stuffed with tomatoes at every turn, commented acidly, “Its very name I now perfectly dread — so constantly, so regularly, does it come up every day, prepared in every imaginable way.” Even tomato-resistant England — where in 1826 John James Audubon had flabbergasted his hosts by eating a whole tomato, raw — had given way by midcentury.

  Mrs. Isabella Beeton’s famous Book of Household Management (1859–1861), an immense and invaluable tome that covered everything for the beginning housewife, from the appropriate amount of a butler’s salary to a diagram of the vascular system of plants, recommended tomatoes stewed, baked, and turned into ketchups and sauces. She noted of tomatoes, “In this country it is much more cultivated than it formerly was; and the more the community becomes acquainted with the many agreeable forms in which the fruit can be prepared, the more widely will its cultivation be extended.” Stewed tomatoes, she adds, should be served on a silver vegetable dish.

  The common garden tomato of the early nineteenth century was lobed, lumpy, and flattish, and looked something like the tuffet that Miss Muffet perched on in old-fashioned nursery-rhyme books. Its ungainly appearance was one cause of slow tomato acceptance, and as tomatoes became more popular in the kitchen, gardeners began to select for bigger, rounder, more symmetrical, and generally better-looking fruits.

  The first major breeding success story was the Trophy tomato, developed in the 1850s by a Dr. Hand of Baltimore County, Maryland, who painstaking crossed a small, smooth-skinned ornamental tomato with a larger, lobed garden variety. The product — smooth-skinned, solid, glossy, and attractively shaped like an apple — was passed on to a Colonel George E. Waring of Rhode Island by Dr. Hand’s son, who had met the colonel at a meeting of the American Jersey Cattle Club.

  Waring, the future sponsor of Hand’s tomato, was a scientific farmer and sanitation engineer, the author of Book of the Farm, A Farmer’s Vacation, and Draining for Profit and Draining for Health, and a master marketer. He offered seeds of the Trophy for sale at an outrageous price of 25 cents apiece, while simultaneously offering a prize of $100 “for the heaviest tomato grown from seed purchased directly from me.” The response was overwhelming and soon Waring was announcing that “it is evident that henceforth the Trophy will be the only tomato grown in America.” It wasn’t, but it did dominate tomato patches for decades and figures in the parentage of hundreds of tomato varieties grown today.

  By the 1880s seed catalogs routinely offered upwards of a dozen tomato varieties, with numbers increasing annually. In 1885, Vilmorin-Andrieux, in The Vegetable Garden, listed five varieties of ribbed tomatoes; four of round tomatoes, including the Apple-Shaped Red, Apple-Shaped Rose, and Apple-Shaped Purple; two pear-shaped or fig tomatoes; one plum tomato; one cherry tomato (yellow); the curiously shaped King Humbert tomato, flat on four sides and in cross-section nearly square; and the Turk’s-Cap tomato, which bore a topknotlike protuberance in the middle much like that of the turban gourds.

  In 1888, W. Atlee Burpee’s Farm Annual offered fifteen large-fruited and seven small-fruited tomato cultivars, among them the pulchritudinous Trophy, as well as the Perfection, Cardinal, Mayflower, and Golden Queen. Also available was the Faultless Early, which, Burpee stated with admirable objectivity, was far from faultless, the fruits being disappointingly rough. By 1901, Burpee felt comfortable declaring that “The tomato now rivals all other vegetables and fruits in popularity, having reached a use beyond that of the potato and apple combined.”

  Despite its past and present popularity, the average tomato, nutritionally, is no great shakes. Though plugged as the “oranges of the vegetable garden” for their reputedly high vitamin C content, tomatoes are actually unimpressive. A tomato provides only about one-third as much vitamin C as a green pepper or a cantaloupe half, one-fourth as much vitamin C as a cup of orange juice, and one-fifth as much as a stalk of broccoli. In a comparative study, tomatoes were found to rank sixteenth in overall concentration of ten selected vitamins and minerals, considerably behind such traditional good-for-yous as spinach (#2) and lima beans (#4). (Top of the list was broccoli.) As specific sources of vitamins C and A, tomatoes ranked thirteenth and sixteenth, respectively.

  The tomato makes up for its deficiencies in nutritional quality, however, by the quantities in which we consume it. Tomatoes rank high in contribution of nutrients to the American diet simply because we eat a lot of them. Tomatoes, to their credit, are among the foods that weight-watchers can eat of lot of with a clear conscience: they contain 93.5 percent water (only cucumbers and a few leafy vegetables contain more) and log in at a piddling 4 calories per ounce. That means that for the caloric price of a chocolate ice cream cone you can wolf down about three hundred cherry tomatoes.

  Nutritionally, it’s also possible to stack the deck by using some care in selecting your tomatoes. Homegrown types, for example, ripened all the way on the vine, have about one-third more vitamin C than the artificially ripened supermarket varieties; and organic tomatoes — those that get their nitrogen from manure and compost — are higher in antioxidants than conventionally grown tomatoes, fed on commercial fertilizers. A study conducted at the University of California at Davis found that organic tomatoes contained nearly twice as much quercetin and kaempferol — flavonoids with potent antioxidant activity — as their conventionally grown cousins.

  For the caloric price of a chocolate ice cream cone, you can wolf down three hundred cherry tomatoes.

  Some tomato cultivars have also been specifically bred for high nutrient content. The P20 Blue tomato, for example, a cross between a garden red and a wild tomato from Peru, has exceptionally high levels of antioxidant flavonoids — in the form of anthocyanin, which turns the fruit a deep purple-blue. The Doublerich, an early red medium-sized tomato, contains twice the vitamin C of ordinary tomatoes — most of it, as in all tomatoes, concentrated in the jellylike material in the middle, surrounding the seeds. The USDA-developed 97L97 tomato contains forty times more vitamin A than other varieties; and the high-yielding plum-shaped Health Kick tomato is essentially a juicy vegetable vitamin pill, with enhanced levels of vitamins A, B, and C, potassium, iron, and lycopene.

  Lycopene, a carotenoid and an antioxidant, is the chemical that makes tomatoes tomato red, as well as putting the color in pink watermelon, pink grapefruit, and red bell peppers. Some recent evidence indicates that lycopene may be a cancer preventive, reducing the risks of prostate and breast cancer. It has also been shown to lower the risks of heart disease and age-related macular degeneration, a retinal condition that can lead to visual impairment or blindness.

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  Eating Paste

  To get the most lycopene out of a tomato, you have to cook it. In fact, it’s best if you process your tomatoes at high heat, with a bit of oil thrown in. The reason has to do with the chemical structure of lycopene. In the luscious raw tomato, fresh off the vine, lycopene is in its trans configuration — that is, in the form of long straight skinny molecules that are poorly absorbed by the human digestive tract.

  In the boiled and oiled tomato, however, lycopene curls up into an alternative cis configuration, in which state it can be far more easily absorbed. Those who eat their tomatoes as paste or sauce absorb over 50 percent more lycopene than those who eat their tomatoes as nature made them.

  * * *

  It may even function as a low-grade internal sunscreen. Some studies have shown that tomato eating staves off UV-induced skin damage, boosting the levels of essential skin structural proteins — the compounds that keep us supple and smooth — and countering the wrinkly effects of aging.

  Today there are literally thousands of tomato varieties. In seed
catalogs, these are usually roughly categorized according to size and shape. Beefsteak tomatoes are the biggest of the bunch: garden whoppers, dense, meaty, and favored for tomato sandwiches. The current world record for largest tomato is held by a beefsteak variety: grown by Gordon Graham of Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986, the winner was the size of a goldfish bowl and weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces.

  Oxheart tomatoes are large, but not as gargantuan as beefsteaks, and are shaped like ox hearts, although most catalogs understandably prefer to compare them to strawberries. Salad or slicing tomatoes, a large and miscellaneous group, are generally medium-sized juicy types, too slurpy to cook down properly and so best eaten raw. Cherry tomatoes are the round, more or less cherry-sized varieties, also popular for salads, and plum or paste tomatoes are solid, thick-walled oblongs, good for strewing into sauce and soup.

  Generally ignored in seed catalogs is the most spectacular success among paste-style hybrids: the so-called “square” tomato, a tough and vaguely blocky fruit, permutations of which are the standard tomatoes of the commercial processing industry. These are the tomatoes you find today in cans on supermarket shelves. Originally developed in the 1950s, the square tomato, officially known by the Star Trekkish designation “Cultivar VF-145,” was designed solely with machines in mind. Mechanical harvesters squished most ordinary tomato cultivars, which tend to be fragile, which led UC Davis crop specialist Gordie “Jack” Hanna to develop the thick-skinned and solid VF-145.

  The thugs of the tomato world, these are the fruits you want to grab if you need a projectile in a food fight. California grows about 95 percent of America’s processing tomatoes, and each of us eats — in pizza, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and ketchup — about 71 pounds of them a year.

  The world’s largest tomato was grown by Gordon Graham of Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986. It was the size of a goldfish bowl and weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces.

  Far more popular among gardeners are heirloom tomatoes, old-fashioned open-pollinated varieties, each at least 50 years in cultivation. Among these are such time-honored favorites as the Green Zebra, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Crimson Cushion, Ponderosa, Black Prince, Arkansas Traveler, and Ivory Egg. We can enjoy these today, just as they were picked off the vine back in the days of FDR’s fireside chats, because of a sexual glitch. Tomatoes, when it comes to reproduction, are suspiciously self-indulgent.

  The making of a tomato begins, conventionally enough, with the fertilization of a female ovule by male pollen. Pollen grains land on the sticky surface of the stigma — the smokestack-like tip of the pistil, the female organ containing the ovary — and germinate, extending long tubes that terminate at the ovary. Down these tubes travel a pair of fertilization-bent male nuclei, one of which fuses with the female “egg” to form the seed embryo, the other with an adjacent cell to form the endosperm, future food for the developing infant plant.

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  Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter

  Perhaps the catchiest name among heirloom tomatoes is Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, an enormous pinkish tomato developed by M. C. Byles of West Virginia in the financially dismal days of the Great Depression.

  Byles, a mechanic whose knack with blown-out radiators gave him the nickname “Radiator Charlie” (his given name was Marshall Cletis), bred the tomato in his backyard garden. The new tomato was so delicious and so huge, averaging an awesome two and a half pounds a fruit, that Byles was soon selling his seedlings for a dollar apiece to clamoring customers from as much as 200 miles away. The tomatoes — presumably with a little help from radiators — allowed Byle to pay off his mortgage and gave the tomato its name.

  * * *

  Tomato forebears, both wild South American tomatoes and the early Central American cultivated varieties, were cross-pollinated by insects. To facilitate this, the ancestral tomato blossom possessed an extended (exserted) stigma that stuck up well beyond the anther cone, where the (male) pollen is produced. In that elevated position, it was much more likely to contact pollen grains from tomato neighbors. Pollen grains from the home blossom, to hit the receptive target, would have had to defy gravity and fall up.

  When translocated to Europe, the abrupt dearth of pollinating insects left the tomato stranded — no bugs means no mates, means no seeds — and its eventual solution was incest. The stigma gradually retracted, to sit well down within the anther cone, which shift in position allowed for self-fertilization; in fact, made it a virtual necessity. It allowed the bugless tomato to survive, but also made it genetically boring. The self-fertilized tomato, having no new genetic material to work with, simply repeats itself. For all their seeming diversity, cultivated tomatoes are pretty much endless iterations of more of the same.

  Scientists estimate that garden tomatoes have less than 5 percent of the genetic variation of their wild relatives. At a guess, a mere ten genes control all tomato characteristics available to gardeners today: small to stupendous; round, ribbed, pear, or plum; pink, purple, red, yellow, orange, black, white, or green. In the world of plants, the cultivated tomato is the inbred equivalent of the pharaohs of Egypt, who married their sisters, and an exemplar of all those jokes about redneck family trees. If tomatoes were dogs, they’d have hip dysplasia; and if they were nineteenth-century European royalty, they’d have mental disorders, hemophilia, and funny-looking ears.

  When translocated to Europe, the abrupt dearth of pollinating insects left the tomato stranded — no bugs means no mates, means no seeds — and its eventual solution was incest.

  Hybrid tomatoes nowadays owe their admirable germplasm in large part to plant geneticist Charles Rick of UC Davis, who spent the bulk of his multi-decade career trekking through the Andes in search of their wild relatives. Rick, who died in 2002 at the age of 87, was famously known on campus for his beard, bicycle, and crumpled army fatigue hat. In the world of tomatoes, he was a legend, singlehandedly preserving seventeen different wild tomato species — among them a tomato of the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, whose seeds frustratingly refused to germinate until Rick discovered that they first had to be partially digested in the gut of the Galapagos tortoise. The result of Rick’s dedication and effort is UC Davis’s Tomato Genetics Resource Center, now a repository of thousands of wild and mutant tomato samples.

  Genomics, for all that it makes many on-the-ground jeans-and-trowel gardeners nervous, has done a lot for the tomato. Genes that confer resistance to nearly fifty different tomato maladies — among them nematodes, fusarium wilt, and tobacco mosaic virus — have been found in Rick’s wild tomatoes, and bred into their previously frail and susceptible domestic relatives. Researchers have also identified a potentially valuable salttolerant tomato species on the Galapagos Islands — it grows on the coast, five yards above the high-tide line, and can survive in seawater — and a drought-resistant variety in western Peru, which essentially survives on what little water it gets from fog. A continuing worry among plant geneticists is that such species and traits, many of them already endangered, will vanish before their best features can be incorporated into the domestic gene pool.

  Its seeds refused to germinate until they were partially digested in the gut of the Galapagos tortoise.

  The tomato is an unusual plant in that cell division in the future fruit is over almost at the moment of fertilization. A tiny, but fully formed, infant tomato can be seen at the base of the flower as soon as it opens. Further development is largely a matter of cell growth — existing tomato cells, rather than multiplying, simply get bigger.

  Usually the tomato reaches full size in twenty to thirty days, about half the length of the total ripening period. During this time, the growing fruit accumulates quantities of water, minerals, and starch. New cell-wall material is also laid down, in the form of cellulose — the primary stiffening component in plant cells, digestible only with difficulty by cows and termites, and not at all by people — embedded in an equally indigestible layer of insoluble cement-like pectin. Cellulose and pectin ar
e the main contributors to the green tomato’s crunchy texture.

  Once the tomato reaches mature peak size, it passes through a one- to two-week maturation period, during which starch storage continues and a number of developmental changes pave the way for the nitty-gritty of ripening. Mature peak size varies considerably from cultivar to cultivar. These range from huge — among them the Big Boy, the Mammoth Wonder, and the Watermelon Beefsteak, which puts out pink two-pounders — to tiny, with their names reminiscent of miniature poodles, such as Toy Boy, Tiny Tim, Sweetie, and Small Fry.

  At whatever size, however, once growth and maturation are complete, ethylene production goes up, along with an abrupt rise in respiration, which, scientists tell us, signals the beginning of the end in the life of a tomato. This respiratory upsurge, termed a climacteric rise, is displayed by a number of fruits — the cantaloupe, honeydew melon, watermelon, peach, pear, plum, and apple, as well as the tomato. (Nonclimacteric fruits, among them oranges and lemons, ripen without an initial respiratory skyrocket.)

  About two days after the tomato reaches the mature green stage, the color change, the most obvious of the ripening processes, commences. Initially the fruit lightens in a star-shaped pattern at the blossom end — the “starbreaker” stage, to those in the tomato trade. It then proceeds gradually through yellowish pink to orange to the deep rich red ordinarily associated with the mouthwatering ripe garden tomato.

  Chemically, this color change is due to the breakdown of chlorophyll (green) and the synthesis of carotenoids (yellow and red), including the tomato-red lycopene. Yellow tomatoes produce yellow carotenoids, but no red lycopene; orange tomatoes are similarly lycopene-less, but high in the carotenoid beta-carotene, which also puts the orange in carrots and sweet potatoes. White tomatoes degrade chlorophyll normally but synthesize no carotenoids — a behavior governed by an eerie genetic locus termed gh for ghost. There is even a variety of tomato that ripens, but does not degrade chlorophyll and so remains confusingly green. It is called, appropriately, Evergreen.