Jim Hightower: Squeezing More Profits from Crummy Tomatoes
Squeezing More Profits from Crummy Tomatoes
Friday, 20 September 2013 09:36
By Jim Hightower, OtherWords | Op-Ed
“I’m 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better,” Professor Harry Klee recently exulted to The New York Times.
Hmmm. Excuse me, professor, but “substantially better” than what? One of Momma Nature’s own heirloom varieties perhaps? No, no — Klee knows that tomato-tampering flavorologists like him can’t get near that quality.
Rather, he’s merely out to endow the industrial, massed-produced fruits of agribusiness with enough tomato-y taste to pass as a minimally acceptable version of the real thing.
How? By artificially injecting them with some flavor genes from actual tomatoes. Why? So the corporate powers can retake market share and profits they’ve been losing to small producers of the natural product. ........................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18964-squeezing-more-profits-from-crummy-tomatoes
= new reply since forum marked as read
actually earlier than that, in the 1920s with the short growing variety that showed up as a mutation called Cooper's Special. That one in a way started the canning industry, as it was used to breed short-growing (determinate) varieties that could be field planted and machine harvested, since they ripen nearly all at once. (most supermarket tomatoes are modern short growing determinate hybrids...yuck).
But 1949 - when companies actually started selling seeds that were F1 hybrids - that was a significant change (some great varieties such as Rutgers and Marglobe started life as hybrids, the were selected and stabilized to reproducable from saved seed - aka open-pollinated - and then released to the public). You certainly can save seeds from hybrids, but what you get will be mom, dad and whatever in between, which may be good or bad. And the creation of many hybrids is more about working in disease tolerance and resistances, and aiming them at commercial growers, not home gardeners. But there are good ones....
Not all hybrids are bad (I couldn't live without the orange cherry tomato "Sungold"
, and not all heirlooms/non-hybrids are great (I still can't understand the joy about German Johnson). I like Lemon Boy too....and Sweet Million. They are hybrids.
But truly great tomatoes will never be easy to find - they are just too perishable - so it will be farmer's markets and people's gardens where the best will be found.
And that's all I will say about tomatoes at the moment (but I could talk about them for days...weeks...months!)
celebration.....but we treat tomatoes like seasonal treats, just like strawberries, etc. Like they were meant to be!
