Barry Estabrook explains how the modern day tomato came to be:
I was driving down an interstate highway in Southwestern Florida and come up behind what I thought at first was a gravel truck. As I got closer, I saw what I took for Granny Smith apples — and I thought, “Those don’t grow in Florida.” When I got really close, I saw it was full of bright green tomatoes. No pink — just green.
I was mesmerized, and then the truck hit a bump. Three tomatoes came flying off and nearly went through my windshield. I noticed that they hit the pavement on I-75, bounced and then rolled into the ditch.
They didn’t shatter, they didn’t splatter; they stayed intact. I thought, “My God! What have they done to this wonderful fruit?”
Winter tomatoes that we get in our grocery stores and in fast food places are picked when they’re bright green. Any hint of coloration is treasonous in a Florida tomato field in the winter. The industry says they’re “mature green” and supposedly might develop flavor, but there’s no way the pickers can tell the difference between mature and immature.
These green tomatoes are taken back to a warehouse, packed in boxes, which are stacked on pallets and moved into storage areas where they’re exposed to ethylene gas. The gas forces the tomatoes to turn the right color; it doesn’t ripen them.
There are two factors at work here. The first is that the tomatoes are picked when they’re immature and no matter what you do, an immature tomato will never get any taste; though it might look alluring.
The second problem with industrial tomatoes is that for the last fifty years, they’ve been bred for one thing only, and that’s yield. One farmer told me, “I get paid per pound. I don’t get paid a cent for taste.” Sadly, he was right.
This leaves unanswered the question of why customers won’t pay for taste.
Perhaps they mix flavorful tomatoes in with the crap, so that the buyer is unable to distinguish them. There should eventually be a market for “real tasting tomatoes” but it will be a small market.
People are stupid. That’s how wealth is distributed in a market system in which the masses are not supervised or guided by superior influences.
Wealth flows from the dumb to the smart. It’s not more ethical than a society in which the physically weak are exploited by the physically strong. Just different ethics.
In a literate society, with the equalizing agent of projectile weapons (gunpowder democratized violence as printing democratized literacy), the apologists for the latter system of ethics will win out in the intellectual arena, and enforce their ascendancy with hired muscle.
The type(s) of man this system of ethics breeds over generations is the modern American consumer, equal part wage-slave and obese consumer of garbage, cultural, nutritional, etc…
He has no adult supervision or protection afforded him. His intellectual superiors are his exploiters rather than his guardians.
Contrast with the type bred in traditional societies with a physically and intellectually dominant class.
Inequality will always exist, the question is how it will be expressed, manifested, organized… the ultimate judge must in the end be aesthetic. Which human is desired. EBT card swiping McDonald’s consumers, living alternately in chronic unemployment or hopping around in the global rat race. Exploited by advertising, marketing, and so on….
Or a society with a genuine ruling class and a sovereign state, which allows its dependents human dignity, social stability, a normal family life, perhaps a little religion…
There is a market segment that will pay for taste. That specific farmer does not sell to that market. He sells to a wholesaler who pays for yield.
Properly ripened, tasty tomatoes of old-school variety don’t travel well and this drives the cost way up.
This commenter is lucky he lives in a place with phenomenal local food.
I didn’t realize they had a taste! They’ve always been tasteless objects as long as I can remember.
Hippocratic Thought Experiment: replace the word “taste” in Red’s comment with “health benefit”. Discuss.