Tomatoland (28 page)

Peter Hoffman, the celebrated chef/owner of the restaurants Savoy and Back Forty in Manhattan, drifted by, wearing a pair of denim shorts and an old shirt. Even before it became a foodie gospel and bankable trend, Hoffman focused on buying local products and was a driving force behind the creation of
Chefs Collaborative, an organization of culinary professionals dedicated to working closely with local farmers. Consulting a sheet of creased paper, he said, “One large and one medium,” chef shorthand that meant that he had come to pick up one flat of assorted large heirloom tomatoes and one
of medium. Stark handed him the flats, and Hoffman asked whether he could leave them on the sidewalk beside the truck and pick them up after he had finished trawling through the rest of the market. I took the opportunity to ask him why he and other chefs flocked to Stark’s stand. He paused to think and then replied matter-of-factly, “It’s all about taste, really.”

Stark has built his business on the ineffable
flavor of a real tomato, the very trait that industrial tomato producers have bred out of their product in a rush toward higher yields, disease resistance, toughness, shelf life, and round uniformity—“something red to put in their salad.”

Hoffman said, “He’s taken a lot of time and care in the field to make his soil healthy and that results in deeper flavors. He picks when his tomatoes are ripe. And he has passion and devotion to doing a good job, and ultimately we can taste that.” If you were to order a salad of Stark tomatoes in one of Hoffman’s restaurants, you might be surprised how little of the chef’s hand is reflected in the dish compared to the farmer’s. “Basically I cut the tomatoes and arrange a beautiful plate with all the different sizes and shapes. Then I drizzle it with some good oil and an acid and some great salt—maybe some fresh herbs,” Hoffman said, gesturing toward the throngs of ordinary shoppers who swarmed in the spaces between Greenmarket’s stalls. “Farmers’ markets are burgeoning. Thousands and thousands of people shop in them every day. The lesson is that people really appreciate good flavor. You can fool a lot of folks into eating crap, but they notice the difference immediately when you give them something truly good. That’s what Tim has done.”

By noon, Eckerton’s truck was almost empty. Stark grabbed a Brandywine out of a box and walked across the street to a falafel vendor. He gave it to the puzzled Middle Eastern cook, who had a full stainless steel pan of chopped food-service tomatoes on the counter. “Use this one in ours,” Stark said, explaining that he had a stand at the market and had grown the tomato himself. Lunch in hand, we
climbed back aboard Stark’s pickup for the return drive to Pennsylvania. But his workday was far from over. Before we had made it across town to the tunnel, he phoned back to an intern at Union Square to remind her to collect an overdue payment from a restaurant. In a frantic call that came in as we rolled through Newark, New Jersey, Miller, who was still working the back of the box truck, announced that they had nearly sold out. There wouldn’t be enough beefsteak tomatoes to fill a standing order from Tom Colicchio’s ’wichcraft—an upscale sandwich and takeout place that exclusively features Stark’s tomatoes on its signature BLT. Once Eckerton runs out of beefsteaks for the season, the BLT is removed from the menu until the following summer. And Stark had a crop of late tomatoes that he had hoped to keep selling to ’wichcraft for at least a few more weeks. “I try to spread out what I have with all the people I deal with. You don’t want the chef from ESCA coming and asking how come he didn’t get any tomatoes when one of his competitors did,” he said. Steering through the traffic, Stark reached the cell phone of Nacho, who as usual had been left in charge of activities back on the farm. Were there any ripe beefsteaks? Could they be picked and packed immediately? Was anyone available to make a special trip into the city to keep an important customer supplied? Then he was on the phone to a chef at ’wichcraft. When, exactly, did he need beefsteaks? Would tomorrow do, or did it have to be today? As soon as Stark hung up, his phone rang again. It was Nacho. Yes, ripe beefsteaks were available. Yes, someone could drive them into town. Another crisis averted.

Thinking again about what Stark had said about
niche marketing,
I was reminded of a passage
in
Omnivore’s Dilemma
, in which
Michael Pollan discusses “
artisanal economics,” a theory that
Allan Nation outlined in the magazine
Stockman Grass Farmer
. Nation contends that industrial farmers sell commodities, crops that are intentionally produced to be identical to each other. The only way to compete, according to Nation, is to offer goods that cost less than the next farmer’s. A rush to the bottom becomes inevitable.

Clearly, that is what has happened to commercial growers in Florida, who struggle to compete with nearly identical tomatoes grown in Mexico and with hydroponic produce from
Canada. Artisanal economics—of which Eckerton’s efforts are a perfect example—turns that approach on its head. It celebrates oddness. Uniformity is odious, variation sought after. Stark’s competitive advantage comes from being special and selling an exceptional product to a local market, where free word of mouth replaces expensive advertising campaigns. Instead of trying to fix the “bad” qualities of a tomato—softness, differing shapes and sizes, a restricted growing season—Stark embraces the fruit’s intrinsic “tomato-ness” and in doing so has built a business that allows his employees to buy cars, purchase homes, and send children to private high schools back in Mexico. He doesn’t harm the land or sicken his workers with chemicals. And he and other farmers like him have put good-tasting tomatoes that customers can feel good about buying within reach of every person living near a farmers’ market.

As we crossed the Delaware River back into Pennsylvania at about two o’clock in the afternoon, Stark got a call from Miller at Greenmarket. They were packing up early. Every last tomato—two tons in total—had been sold. Eckerton had grossed nearly $15,000. Payroll would be made again. For the first time in thirty hours, Stark relaxed, exhaling loudly. “Maybe I’ll get tired of this someday,” he said. “But for me, for now, it seems like the right thing to do.”

epilogue

WILD THINGS

I
went to northwestern
Peru hoping to find a wild
Solanum pimpinellifolium
, the progenitor of the tomatoes we eat. But after an hour’s drive north of the regional capital of Trujillo on the Pan American Highway, I figured I would be fortunate to encounter any living plant. The desert stretched away on both sides of the road. From the hazy peaks of the Andes lying to the east, to a gray wall of fog stretching west over the Pacific Ocean, the landscape was devoid of life—not a tree, bush, blade of grass, or cactus to be seen. In comparison, the Sonoran and
Mojave Deserts of California and Arizona look like verdant pastures.
Roger Chetelat, the tomato geneticist at the University of California Davis, had given me the geographical coordinates of the sites where his research team had spotted wild tomato populations while doing field research in 2009. He had also warned me that my chances of finding one were not great, because of the pressures of
urbanization and large-scale agriculture. He had e-mailed a list of local names for
S. pimpinellifolium
:
tomatito
(little tomato),
tomate cimarrón
(wild tomato),
tomate del campo
(field tomato),
tomate de culebras
(snake tomato),
tomate de zorro
(fox tomato), and
tomates silvestres
(wild tomatoes) to share with my guides. Before we left town, my driver, Carlos
Chavez Garcia, read it over, shrugged, and passed it to another driver, who also shrugged. Neither of them recognized any of them.

Chavez and I had not seen a single tomato when he turned his mint-condition twelve-year-old Toyota Corolla off the Pan American Highway and began to negotiate a twisty secondary road that paralleled the Rio Jequetepeque into the Andes. Fed by melting snows from the mountains, rivers such as the Jequetepeque were diverted by the region’s earliest human inhabitants into a network of canals that allowed farming to flourish and civilizations to develop. Some of those same canals are still in use today. Chavez drove past fields of rice, corn, leafy greens, and tomatoes of the domestic variety. But not a single
S. pimpinellifolium
. As Chetelat had warned, every arable patch of land was tilled, right to the banks of the canals and the edges of the road.

As we rose higher, the farms dwindled, until eventually we were back in a lifeless land of sheer cliffs and boulder-strewn slopes, surrounded on all sides by jagged, barren peaks. Chetelat had given me the coordinates for “a pretty good cluster”
just outside Tembladera
, a neat little town on the banks of a turquoise-colored reservoir. When my handheld GPS receiver ushered us to the spot he had described, there were no plants, just a steep, rocky valley. Chavez stopped the car and consulted three women who were walking away from town carrying plastic shopping bags. They chattered, gesturing up the valley, and shook their heads. Chavez came back to the car. “Wrong time of year,” he said. “They told me that there were wild tomatoes here in the summer, but not now.” He went on to say that the plants I was looking for were called
tomatillos silvestres
by locals and that he remembered snacking on them as a boy on his grandmother’s farm outside of Trujillo, but that he hadn’t seen any in years. “They are gone,” he said.

Chavez pulled a U-turn and we began to drive back toward the highway. The car hadn’t traveled fifty yards when I caught a flash of yellow. “Stop!” I cried. Chavez had to continue some distance along the road before the shoulder widened enough for him to get the car halfway off the pavement. He eyed me with skepticism. I trotted back
toward where I had seen the flowers. There, growing out of the base of what seemed like a solid rock ledge without a trace of earth was a sprawling, jagged-leafed vine. Easily recognizable as a member of the tomato clan, it was covered in sunny yellow flowers, tiny green fruits, and near its base, bright, red miniature tomatoes not much bigger than cranberries. Catching up to me, Chavez said delightedly, “
Tomatillos silvestres
!” and began picking them off the vine and popping them into his mouth as fast as he could, pausing occasionally to repeat, “
Tomatillos silvestres
!”

I picked one for myself and brushed off the road dust with my shirttail. The fruit between my thumb and index finger was as smooth and spherical as a marble. I gave it a squeeze, and it did not yield. I threw it down onto the pavement to see what would happen. It was undamaged, and I popped it into my mouth. The bright, sweet pop of taste was followed by a lingering, pleasant tartness—that essential balance that defines a great tomato.

Notes

INTRODUCTION: ON THE TOMATO TRAIL

If you have ever eaten:
Statistics from the Florida Tomato Commission’s
Tomato 101
,
http://www.floridatomatoes.org/facts.html
.

Americans bought $5 billion:
U.S. Department of Agriculture Economics, Statistics, and Market Information System,
U.S. Tomato Statistics,
Table 070 and 076. I multiplied the average retail price in 2009 by the total production.

In survey after survey:
See Christine M. Bruhn, Nancy Feldman, Carol Garlitz, Janice Harwood, Ernestine Ivans, Mary Marshall, Audrey Riley, Dorothy Thurber, Eunice Williamson, “Consumer Perceptions of Quality: Apricots, Cantaloupes, Peaches, Pears, Strawberries, and Tomatoes,”
Journal of Food Quality
vol. 14, no. 3 (July 1991): pp. 187–95.

According to analyses:
Thomas F. Pawlick, author of
The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply—And What You Can Do About It
(Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2006), originally presented this information. I have updated it. The 1960s figures come from Bernice K. Watt and Annabel L. Merrill,
Composition of Foods: Raw, Processed, Prepared,
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Agricultural Handbook No. 8 (Washington, DC, 1964). My source for 2010 figures is the U.S. Department of Agriculture Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 23:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR23/sr23_doc.pdf
.

A couple of winters ago:
Pawlick (see above) performed a similar “experiment.”

Little wonder that tomatoes are by far the most popular:
National Gardening Association, “The Impact of Home and Community Gardening in America” (2009),
http://www.gardenresearch.com/index.php?q=show&id=3126
.