Scientific American recently published an article called How to Grow a Better Tomato: The Case against Heirloom Tomatoes. The author details how plant breeders are going about saving heirloom tomatoes from their own fatal flaws. The article was written in a combative tone with the author seemingly intent on provoking a knee-jerk reaction from lovers of good, real food not managed under laboratory conditions. It worked. The article garnered 80 comments, most from home gardeners taking issue with the errors peppering in the article like tomato seeds on a cutting board. The piece even provoked comments from some of the people in the article—namely employees of Monsanto. Seeing the name Monsanto connected with the concept of “improving” yet another food, makes it a little difficult to be neutral, but I’m going to try to look at this article with an open mind.

The author says, “heirlooms are actually feeble and inbred—the defective product of breeding experiments that began during the Enlightenment and exploded thanks to enthusiastic backyard gardeners from Victorian England to Depression-era West Virginia. Heirlooms are the tomato equivalent of the pug—that “purebred” dog with the convoluted nose that snorts and hacks when it tries to catch a breath.”

I’m wondering why, if they are so feeble, have heirloom tomatoes been passed down and saved for generations? And why do they continue to thrive?

The author says that heirlooms actually lack genetic diversity compared to hybrid varieties. He quotes a plant geneticist as saying that “there’s probably no more than 10 mutant genes that create the diversity of heirlooms you see.”

I’m not a geneticist but couldn’t these 10 genes be combined in endless combinations to produce the variety we see? And isn’t variety inherent when it’s obvious to anyone that there are hundreds of varieties of heirlooms and only a few hybrids that are grown commercially and by backyard gardeners?

The article also says that heirlooms are more susceptible to fungus that cause cracking and rot.

Haven’t gardeners been saving seeds that are well adapted to grow well in their particular soil and climate? Might the problem of hardiness be more a problem of growing certain heirlooms in places where they are ill suited?

He then quotes a scientist as saying that the celebrated superior flavor of heirloom tomatoes is really due to the fact that they have much lower yields than hybrids (sometimes only 2 fruits) and because they are ripened on the vine. The great flavor has nothing to do with their genetic make-up.

Even a gardener with a black thumb, like myself, will see that statement about heirlooms only setting two fruits as a wild exaggeration. And of course anything ripened on the vine is going to taste better than something picked green, gassed with ethylene, and transported by truck. That’s a given, so why do we need Monsanto to transform heirloom tomatoes into something that can stand up to such treatment?

Both the plant breeder and the Monsanto PR person saw fit to comment on the article for their own reasons due to misstatements in the article, such as the assertion that hybrid seeds are sterile. They are not. Since the article ran, the editor has changed some of the offending passages (marked by asterisks). The comment by Monsanto’s PR person stated that they didn’t like the title of the piece because they are doing what they are doing for the love of heirlooms….because they really want to save them.

And that’s when we get to the real point. The company that brought us PCBs, Agent Orange, rBGH, tried to patent the pig, and has unleashed a litany of misery worldwide doesn’t want to save heirloom tomatoes for us. They want to patent and own them. Though the company has met with resistance to nearly every product it has tried to sell worldwide, it just keeps plugging along like a nightmarish telemarketer on endless redial. Monsanto won’t stop until they own every seed on the planet. This article in Grist from last year estimates that with Monsanto’s 2008 acquisition of Dutch tomato breeding company, De Ruiter Monsanto may now control as much as 85% of the US tomato market. Even though the PR person states in the comment section that Monsanto is doing this for commercial gardens, not home gardeners, I think it might be prudent for all home gardeners to lock up your heirloom tomato seeds in a safe place and watch which way the wind blows.

My friend Josh, an organizer for Rainforest Action Network (get involved!), always tells me that without optimism we have no hope of changing the world. Maybe that seems obvious if you think about it, but it requires a fairly radical repositioning of my social-political framework which was born out of a punk rock anger at all the injustices of our world and a sort of despondency mixed with fear that it could never change. Now what kind of introduction to a food-related post is this? Well, it’s one that gets at the inspiration and hope I had listening to Billy Bragg say much the same thing as Josh last night at the Somerville Theatre. And in hearing it at that moment, I sat back and thought about all of the ways to find hope in the everyday and, somewhat strangely perhaps, realized that one thing I have been continually inspired to hope by this year is the current tomato trend.

If it seems like every year you are seeing more and more varieties of local, heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s markets, at specialty stores, at conventional big box grocery stores, you’re right. Though seed-saving on the whole has experienced significant declines, especially in the last decade, many growers are saving, sharing, planting and tending a great number of unusual tomato plants, and the market for them is growing as well. Despite the fact that these heirloom fruit are more labor intensive to grow, more delicate to bring to market, and thus more expensive than their perfect red round laboratory counterparts, they are increasingly popular.

In many ways the trend of increased popularity for heirloom tomato varieties goes against big market-shaping assumptions about what people want from their food. These tomatoes are not cheap, they’re not uniform, they’re not consistently available, they are sometimes even unattractive with lumps and bumps and dark ridges or strange colors that do not fit into our archetype for the perfect tomato. And that’s just the thing, they’re changing the way both producers and consumers think about food. Heirloom tomatoes are on the frontline of expanding possibilities for produce, creating opportunity and incentive to get invested in trying new varieties, support crop diversity, encourage farmers to grow real food from seeds without patents and to say we value and support this kind of production.

There are few people who are not feeling at least the looming shadow of fear caused by the implosion of the credit market, and yet my farmer’s market is busier than it has ever been and people are willing to pay almost four dollars for a pint of cherry tomatoes. I recognize that this is mark of privilege (though there are always customers paying with food stamps at the market), but I also choose to think of it as progress. I like to think that the huge piles of heirloom tomatoes stacked on plywood planks every Saturday morning that dwindle quickly through the opening hours are a sign that people are increasingly willing to pay a real cost of food production for real food. Maybe others look at it the same way I do, as a matter of priorities. I choose to prioritize food and I think that tomatoes were gateway produce for me in this regard. My first year of grad school, cobbling together Boston rent and bill coverage out of a pretty paltry stipend, standing at a farmer’s market table I compared the cost of our pantry staple, Goya black beans, to the cost of heirloom tomatoes and wondered, could it possibly be worth it? I decided that it was. It was worth it not just in that moment as instant gratification, but as a macro thing, as a broad choice for the future of food production.

Fast forward six years to my kitchen window sill this morning in late October and I’m staring at four heirloom tomatoes ripening above a truly obscene, if artful, pile of local squash mostly from my Parker Farm’s CSA (plus an extra red kuri and birdhouse from the farmer’s market that couldn’t be resisted) and I realize that my heirloom tomato-spurred philosophy has been broadly extended. I value food, I value the people who grow food, I particularly value food that comes from my Commonwealth and in so far as it is reasonable for me to do so, I will pay for it because that’s the only way to keep it coming. Watching as the tomatoes year after year become an accepted and valued part of the late summer and fall for people gives me hope that we can broadly shift our ideas about food and put more care into it. Food might seem like a fluffy kitten of a problem compared to other things going on in the world, but our attention and investment in food systems is vital on a macro level and our willingness to put time and energy into cooking and eating and sharing food with each other does not a little to dent our dependence on impersonal and unhealthy factory food and our “bowling alone” culture.

I know I’ve said it before, but food choices are political in both a capital P and baby p sense and in each sense a possibility for change exists. Serving my favorite tomato soup made with rich red tomatoes with craggy tops and tiny golden tomatoes, each one near to or having burst open with juices, from a farm in Lundenburg where I’ve actually seen them growing transforms me in a way that opening a can could not. The question is though, how does that transformation matter? The cynic in me could say that it doesn’t, that it just serves to make me feel good and prop me up on my privilege as a person who can obtain quality foods. A spirit of hope in me though says that it matters in terms of my ability and willingness to extend out from that, to find value in considering all of my choices, beyond food, considering their impact on the world and in my own life. Beyond all the day to day noise, life really might just be as simple as finding joy in something and holding onto it, transforming yourself with it.

That was what Saturday afternoons this summer and fall were all about for me. Though my weekends tend to be the busiest part of the week, I carved out a little ritual that brought me more joy than seems possible: flowers from the yard and or market, a selection of heirloom tomatoes and herbs, white bean puree accented with Spanish olive oil, sea salt, fresh mint and lemon, fresh baked bread, and time to enjoy it all.

[Cross-posted from The Conscious Kitchen]