Your Tomato Book

I read about the red and round fruit around everybody who would listen

Last weekend, DJ and I were visiting his parents in New England. During a lunch of burgers and absolutely heavenly fries, I pointed to the ketchup bottle. “Heinz build a successful ketchup business at the end of the 1800s,” I volunteered, “but then there was a push to ban a certain preservative. So Heinz experimented with his ketchup so he wouldn’t need the preservative. It worked, but all that vinegar he added had to be balanced by more sugar. So the ketchup we eat now is much thicker and sweeter than the original ketchup that people first ate.”

My in-laws listened attentively — my husband had already heard this fun-fact, along with dozens more — and said that was very interesting. They listened later when I explained that the first official can of Campbell’s Soup was tomato soup. I thought of giving them a rundown of how strictly regulated “real pizza” is in Italy, but decided I wouldn’t overburden them with such excitement. But trust me, it’s interesting. In fact, the entire development of the tomato, from an astringent berry in ancient Aztec stews, to an integral ingredient of cuisines around the world, is a rollicking adventure. At least, that’s how William Alexander made it feel.

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World was a happy find on the used-book shelf at our library. As I said, the book is a history of how the tomato was developed, popularized, and adopted. Alexander elevates the subject with his research, love for tomatoes, and genuinely funny prose. As I went through the book, I took pictures of pages that made me laugh, and read them in batches to DJ and whichever else of my family was around. Ten Tomatoes, in my house, is known as “your tomato book.”

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Here are a few of my favorite lines from “your tomato book.”

Certainly being in the nightshade family did the tomato no favor, for its fellow nightshade, belladonna, is one of the most toxic plants on the planet, having killed off more popes, cardinals, and Roman emperors than syphilis.

Personally, as one who has such difficulty with foreign languages that I once used my newly-acquired French to tell a waiter in a three-star Parisian restaurant, “I’ll have the ham in newspaper and my son will have my daughter”…

Every can is stamped with a code representing the farm, the date of canning, and the expiration date (three years hence), all requirements of (deep breath) the Consortium for the Protection of the San Marzano Tomato of the Argo Sarnese-Nocerino…

Pizza is more popular in Naples [Italy] than anywhere else on earth; consider that on the first day that the city’s pizzarias were allowed to reopen for takeout following the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, some sixty thousand pies were ordered.

Installing a multiton brick oven was a risky commitment; you weren’t moving your operation down the street if the landlord chose to raise the rent, which of course gave the landlord great incentive to raise the rent.

Italian pizza has been through worse (cholera, wars, and a bad review from Pinocchio) so I’d like to think it will survive Domino’s.

[Introducing Marco Polo via the game played in swimming pools, and then discussing the myth that Marco Polo, the man, brought pasta to Italy from China]: This is thanks to the 1938 biopic in which Gary Cooper, playing Marco Polo (not to be confused with playing “Marco! Polo!”)…

Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod d Le Reniere doesn’t sound Italian—it doesn’t even sound like a single individual…

[Quoting the CEO of a major tomato grower in Florida] “We have bred… a tomato that has the ability to be picked, handled, and sent all over the country and be able to still be consumed.” Alexander: “Be able to still be consumed” is not exactly a glowing endorsement for a food. When Burger King scrapped their slogan of forty years, “Have it your way,” it wasn’t for “Able to be consumed.”

[Discussing said tomato’s durability] In fact, the university laboratories who participated in developing the commercial tomatoes of the last century were instructed to literally think of the tomato as a projectile. Apparently, they listened. In 1977, New Yorker writer Thomas Whiteside measured a Florida tomato against federal safety standards—not food, but automobile—and found that the tomato exceeded by more than two and a half times the minimum impact requirement of your car’s bumper.

As it is, Lipman’s Naples [Florida] farm alone uses some thirty-one thousand miles of twine—enough to circle the earth and add a transatlantic bow…

I also tried to overlook the inconvenient truth that my Brandywine tomatoes, while undeniably delicious, were harder to raise than goldfish in the desert. Early blight yielded to verticillium wilt, which conceded to anthracnose fruit, which abdicated to—if any were left—late blight.

Every day some two hundred trucks loaded with tomatoes cross the border from Ontario to Michigan, moving tomatoes south—no doubt passing trucks driving north with Florida tomatoes. (One can only speculate about the new hybrid that might result from a head-on collision.)

“I can tell you that if you walked out of here with a briefcase full of Campari seeds, it would be worth several hundred thousand dollars.” In other words, Campari seeds are literally worth more—far more—than their weight in gold.

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There are many other lines I enjoyed, not to mention entire sections, such as how the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the tomato as a vegetable (it was related to importation and taxation). Alexander covers so much history—from early New World civilizations to Italian farming, to tomato-based health crazes and canning developments, to accidental and deliberate hybridization, and finally to the possible future of produce being grown in enormous greenhouses—that the book is very re-readable. I’ll probably revisit it in another year or two. You can imagine the joy this inspires in my family, who will once again be treated to fascinating tomato-based facts every time they reach for a ketchup bottle.