Tomatoes: A Love Story

The tomato is Gastropod’s favorite flavor of summer, and we’re not alone: today, it’s the most popular vegetable on the planet, despite the fact that it's technically a fruit. But, until a couple of hundred years ago, the tomato wasn't really anyone's favorite. In South America, where the tomato originates, no one even bothered to domesticate it; in Mexico, the Aztecs seem to have preferred tomatillos; Renaissance Europeans thought this member of the nightshade family was practically poisonous; and, until the 1830s, most Americans considered them an “acquired taste.” Even in Italy, where the culinary mainstays of pizza and pasta now depend on red sauce, it took centuries to catch on. So why was the tomato so unloved—and how did it end up converting the haters on its rise to glory? Listen in this episode for the story of how Italian block parties, snake oil pills, and the state of Florida played in a role in the tomato’s journey to global domination—as well as the epic tale of one man’s quest to make the industrial tomato taste great again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Yes, you like potato and I like potato. You like tomato and I like tomato. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let's call the whole thing off.

• 0:17Nicola Twilley?

  Hmm, I wonder what this episode is about. Is it about the way I say tomato?

• 0:21Cynthia Graber?

  No, but this is the perfect time to remind all you lovely listeners that Nikki is in fact British. I know, I know, she's been here for so long that she almost sounds like an American. But then there are some words that we differ on, like the tomato.

• 0:34Nicola Twilley?

  Or in fact, tomato.

• 0:36Cynthia Graber?

  We're definitely not going to call the whole thing off.

• 0:38Nicola Twilley?

  Our relationship is solid, Cynthia, but the tomato? That's a more troubled love affair. And we've got the whole story this episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I am Nicola Twilley.

• 0:52Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm Cynthia Graber. This episode, we're finally telling the story of one of my favorite vegetables of all time. Or wait, is it a fruit?

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Oh, well, the United States Supreme Court said it's a vegetable, but the reality is it's a, botanically, it is most definitely a fruit.

• 1:10Nicola Twilley?

  Not the first time the Supreme Court has been wrong. Either way, the tomato is extremely beloved. I love it, the world loves it. It's up there with the potato as the most consumed item in the produce category. So why did humanity's relationship with this delightful vegetable fruit get off to such a rocky start?

• 1:31Cynthia Graber?

  No one seemed to love the tomato where the wild plant originally grew, and even the Italians weren't into it for hundreds of years after they first encountered one.

• 1:39Nicola Twilley?

  And as if repaying us for all this lack of love, why are most tomatoes so disappointing today?

• 1:45Cynthia Graber?

  All that, plus a sneak peek at the tomatoes of the future. But first, we have a quick bit of exciting news. We're getting ready to host our second ever Gastrahang. It's a super fun get together hosted by, yes, us. We all meet online, there are games and behind the scenes stories and more. This year, we'll be getting together on October 8th and invites will go out to supporters in the middle of September. If you're not a supporter yet and you'd like to get on the Gastrahang invite list, go to gastropod.com/support. That's gastropod.com/support.

• 2:15Nicola Twilley?

  This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't. Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands, deep tech that changes the weather.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  We've got hardware that helps blind people see and dairy.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  I never imagined my life journey would be milk.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.

• 3:47Speaker 07

  All right, we got a really good looking one here that's literally warm off the vine. It was in the sun about 10 minutes ago growing. This is the moment I've been waiting for since like February.

• 4:00Speaker 06

  Oh my gosh.

• 4:00Speaker 07

  Starting with the big pink and yellow one. Just a little bit of salt. Here we go. I love it.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  Mmm.

• 4:11Speaker 07

  Mmm. Oh, that's so good.

• 4:15Speaker 06

  That's so good.

• 4:18Nicola Twilley?

  Mmm, a little more fruity.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  You have a slightly darker one here.

• 4:24Nicola Twilley?

  So good. It's like perfect summer.

• 4:28Cynthia Graber?

  Listeners can't see, but I'm doing like a little tomato happy dance.

• 4:32Speaker 07

  That's it. Just leave me here. Eating tomatoes.

• 4:36Speaker 06

  They're so good. Okay, I'm gonna eat the rest of this with some basil and some mozzarella, because that's my ideal life in the summer.

• 4:46Nicola Twilley?

  It is not an exaggeration to say that in summer, we here at Gastropod HQ live for tomatoes. Jeff and I eat them every day, multiple times a day.

• 4:57Cynthia Graber?

  They're our producer Claudia's favorite vegetable to eat and grow, and the same is definitely true for Tim and me.

• 5:02Nicola Twilley?

  And based on the statistics, we're very much not alone in our tomato consumption.

• 5:08Speaker 07

  If we exclude the potato, which should more properly be thought of as a starch, not a vegetable, the tomato is the most popular vegetable on the planet by far.

• 5:22Nicola Twilley?

  William Alexander is the author of Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World. And just to get this Supreme Court elephant out of the way at the start, this fruit-vegetable confusion is because botanists define fruit as an ovary enclosing a plant's seeds, which, yum.

• 5:40Cynthia Graber?

  Basically, this means that a particular plant is flowered, and then the lady part of the flower turns into an ovary around the seed or seeds. Most fruit are, well, fruit, and also a bunch of vegetables fit that definition. Peppers, eggplants, squash, a whole bunch, including the tomato.

• 5:55Nicola Twilley?

  But of course, people like us who are more concerned with eating than botanizing, we categorize tomatoes according to how we eat them, which is typically as a vegetable. Hence the confusion.

• 6:07Cynthia Graber?

  But back to the tomato. It's kind of shockingly popular today, but once upon a time, it was just one of a bunch of random plants in the Andes.

• 6:14Speaker 07

  It is a plant that originated in the mountains of Peru, Ecuador, thousands of years ago. If you walked past one today, you probably wouldn't recognize it as tomato. It looked like, like kind of a scrubby weed, and the fruits were the size of peas.

• 6:36Speaker 07

  As far as we know, it was not eaten at all in South America.

• 6:40Nicola Twilley?

  We haven't tasted the fruit of these wild ancestors. But like Bill says, rumor has it that the ancient Peruvians didn't bother eating or cultivating wild tomatoes because they just weren't that into them.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Ah, they're not very good.

• 6:54Cynthia Graber?

  Ouch. Harry Cle is an emeritus professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. But if they weren't domesticated in the Andes, then who did domesticate the tomato?

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is actually a great question because we don't know. What is known is that actually domestication likely mostly happened in the south of Mexico.

• 7:15Nicola Twilley?

  Gabriela Toledo is an associate professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the founder of a project called the Tomatoes for Tomorrow Initiative. And she told us that somehow this underappreciated wild pea-sized fruit made its way north to Mesoamerica, where the locals took the time to domesticate it.

• 7:34Speaker 07

  And over hundreds of years, it went from that pea-sized fruit to something closer to what we would recognize as tomato today.

• 7:44Cynthia Graber?

  And not just the one most popular tomato today, that round, smooth, red globe. These new domesticated tomatoes came in a huge variety of sizes, shapes, and colors.

• 7:54Speaker 07

  When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1519, they were amazed at just variety and the number of them. They were reported to be green and yellow, red.

• 8:11Speaker 06

  You have the shapes that go from round pear shape. And you also have some, they have very specific shapes that look like a kidney somehow. Some are like called, for example, pumpkin-like because they look like a pumpkin. And I have actually, in some events, used some pictures of these tomatoes without the color. And without the color, people actually cannot know if this is a pear or it's a pumpkin.

• 8:41Nicola Twilley?

  Even despite all that delightful variety, Bill told us that the tomato was not the MVP of Aztec vegetables. Sure, they had cultivated a bunch of them, but did they truly adore the tomato? Maybe not.

• 8:54Speaker 07

  There are even some indications that the Aztec- Aztecs themselves preferred tomateas.

• 9:00Cynthia Graber?

  Tomatoes, if you're not familiar with them, they look a lot like tomatoes, but they're usually hard and green when they're ripe. They grow with a kind of lantern-shaped papery coating around them that you have to remove, and you don't typically eat them raw. You cook them or roast them. They have a delicious citrusy flavor, and they're super common in Mexican sauces.

• 9:17Nicola Twilley?

  And in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the tomateo is called the tomato, while the thing we call a tomato these days was called a heat tomato. That overlap was way too confusing for the conquistadors.

• 9:31Speaker 07

  When the Spanish brought them back, they just took the root of the word for both tomateas and tomatoes, which means a round fruit, and they called them by the same things. So when we read some of the accounts in Spain, we're not always sure which of those two they're talking about.

• 9:50Cynthia Graber?

  OK, so when the Spanish word tomate shows up in the records, we don't know whether they're referring to tomatoes or tomateas. But whichever one, we do know that neither was the favorite among the horticultural haul that Spaniards brought back to Europe with them.

• 10:03Speaker 07

  There were chili peppers, chocolate, squashes they had never seen.

• 10:09Cynthia Graber?

  They raved about chocolate and were fascinated with chilies. They loved a lot of the New World foods, but it doesn't seem like they were super into the tomato.

• 10:16Nicola Twilley?

  The poor tomato, no one loved it. Even the first recorded tomato encounter in Italy was a big fat meh.

• 10:24Speaker 07

  Tomatoes arrive in Italy on All Hallows' Eve, the holiday we now call Halloween, at the Pisa Palazzo of Cosimo de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. And he gets word that a basket of a strange new fruit from the New World has arrived. And the steward summons the entire staff downstairs to witness this new fruit.

• 10:53Cynthia Graber?

  So exciting. Cosimo was known for growing all sorts of cool things. He was already growing maize. He had recently founded Pisa's first botanical garden just a few years earlier. This clearly was going to be another botanical treasure. Surely, everyone would soon be blanketing their pasta with tomato sauce.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  And the steward records this. This historic scene when tomatoes are first unveiled in Italy. And he says, and this is a quote, "The basket was opened and they looked at each other with much thoughtfulness." And that's it, which implies that they really didn't quite know what to make of them.

• 11:33Nicola Twilley?

  I'm starting to feel like someone needs to give the tomato a hug. What's more, things were only going to get worse. As more and more Europeans tried tomatoes, they were just completely panned in the press.

• 11:46Speaker 07

  Many, many of the contemporary writers complained about the strong smell, not just of the fruit, but of the leaves.

• 11:55Cynthia Graber?

  Here's a few choice quotes. One British journal called them odious and repelling smelling berries. A Flemish herbalist said, "The strong, stinking smell gives one sufficient notice how unhealthful and evil they are to eat."

• 12:06Nicola Twilley?

  Northern Europeans hated them the most, but even in Italy, tomatoes did not get great reviews. For example, one influential Paduan doctor listed tomatoes as one of the, quote, "Strange and horrible things that, quote, 'a few unwise people were willing to eat.'"

• 12:24Cynthia Graber?

  So why in the world did people hate tomatoes so intensely?

• 12:28Speaker 07

  Well, the thing that you read most commonly is that they were known to be a member of the nightshade family, which includes, of course, belladonna, which is very toxic poison. It's one of the most poisonous plants on the planet. I don't buy that because they also knew that squash and peppers and eggplants were also in the nightshades. And they were happily eating all of those things. But that's the most common reason that you hear.

• 13:04Nicola Twilley?

  Tomatoes are obviously not poisonous, but even today, you often hear that tomato leaves are poisonous, and that's just not really true. You'd have to eat at least a pound of tomato leaves, which is a frankly ridiculous amount to experience any ill effects at all. It's all part of this bad rap that the tomato didn't deserve.

• 13:25Cynthia Graber?

  Tomatoes were likened to their fellow nightshade, the eggplant, in Italy at the time, but that association with the very edible eggplant probably didn't do the tomato any favors there, because it seems like eggplants were mostly associated with food that poor Jews ate, and Italians at the time weren't too fond of Jews, rich or poor.

• 13:42Nicola Twilley?

  These were all strikes against the tomato. Another issue was that Europeans just didn't know what to do with them.

• 13:49Speaker 07

  I mean, they were very strange. When they came there, they didn't look like anything else Italians had. In fact, some weren't sure which part of the plant to eat. They would take a bite of the leaves and say "pah" and pronounce them unfit.

• 14:05Cynthia Graber?

  And even if they did figure out that the fruit vegetable part was what they should cut into, they wouldn't necessarily have been too impressed when they took a bite. The tomatoes at the time weren't as sweet as a lot of the varieties today. They'd probably have been a lot more acidic. And in any case, you really need to do something to a tomato, not just eat it by itself. Maybe dress it up with some salt and oil or add it to a dish. That's where it really shines. The Europeans didn't know how to let the tomato show itself off.

• 14:31Nicola Twilley?

  And then on top of all of that, the window they would have had to try to figure out their tomato consumption would have been pretty short.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  They go from, you know, hard, green and tasteless to rotten on your windowsill in a matter of days.

• 14:47Cynthia Graber?

  Plus, they didn't grow well in much of Europe, even much of southern Europe. They hadn't been bred yet to do as well in colder climates, so they only really flourished in like southern Italy and parts of Spain at the time. So a lot of people just weren't familiar with them either.

• 14:59Nicola Twilley?

  But one of the biggest reasons the tomato was so shunned was a guy called Galen, who at that point had been dead for more than 1,000 years.

• 15:07Cynthia Graber?

  He and his theories about health were rediscovered during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was all about the rebirth and revival of ancient Greek and Roman arts and architecture.

• 15:16Speaker 07

  Sculpture, literature, but that also extended to some of the medical writings of that time. And foremost among those were the writings of a doctor

• 15:30Speaker 07

  Called Galen of Pergamon.

• 15:32Cynthia Graber?

  The Renaissance was taking place in the 1500s and 1600s in Italy, basically when the tomato showed up. And this callback to Galen and his medical beliefs included adopting his beliefs about how food fit into your overall health. This was called humoral theory, and there were four different humors: cold, hot, wet, and dry.

• 15:49Speaker 07

  So all foods had a property of how wet they were, or a dry, or how hot and cold they were. So, for example, cheese was cold and dry. A lemon was hot and wet. And the idea was to kind of stay in the middle of this, not to get too cold, or too hot, or too dry, or too wet, but to keep that balance so that your humors were in balance.

• 16:22Nicola Twilley?

  And even though Galen himself could never have encountered a tomato, they didn't do well in his system.

• 16:28Speaker 07

  They ended up kind of where you might classify a wet basement, kind of in the coldest and the wettest corner of the chart, and thus were considered very unhealthy, pretty much to be avoided at all costs.

• 16:47Cynthia Graber?

  So you'd think with all this anti-tomato sentiment that absolutely nobody was bothering to eat them. But that wasn't true.

• 16:53Nicola Twilley?

  In Spain, which after all was the tomatoes' first port of call in the Old World, attitudes were a little bit more welcoming. The king's own botanist declared tomatoes "safe to eat and good for sauces" in the late 1500s.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  There are already some of the documents that show that as early as in the 17th century, probably the tomatoes were already part of some of the culinary traditions.

• 17:19Cynthia Graber?

  The Spanish who did eat tomatoes seemed to have enjoyed them with salt and onions and in soups.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  So they did introduce them in similar ways that the Mexicans had done.

• 17:28Nicola Twilley?

  The next place in Europe the tomatoes caught on was southern Italy, which at the time was called the Two Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and was ruled by the Spanish.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  Because Spain at the time had probably

• 17:39Cynthia Graber?

  That were a part of Italy. These were regions whose climate was perfect for the tomato. And so even though the people in the north still feared tomatoes because they were wet and cold, by the late 1700s, early 1800s, southern Italy was ready to become tomato obsessed.

• 17:53Nicola Twilley?

  By then, medicine had moved on a little from Galen's humors.

• 17:56Speaker 07

  And in the south, they didn't have too many other options of what to eat. Southern Italians were incredibly poor. It's hard to imagine how poor they were. And so it turns out that they grew really well in the south. They had a fairly long growing season and they added a little color to a really drab diet.

• 18:21Nicola Twilley?

  Indeed, they grew so well and became so popular that southern Italians developed remarkably tasty ways to preserve their tomato glut so they could eat tomatoes all year round.

• 18:31Speaker 07

  One of the most successful ways that they did this was they cut the tomatoes in half, put a little salt on them and put them on their roofs. They were the first ones to do sun dried tomatoes.

• 18:45Cynthia Graber?

  A few decades ago, in the 80s and 90s, sun dried tomatoes were like the hot ingredient and they were in everything, everywhere. Then they kind of became passe. But I can assure you that they are in fact delicious and totally still worthy of a spot in your fridge. I buy them packed in olive oil and they're great chopped up in grain salads.

• 19:02Nicola Twilley?

  But the real southern Italian tomato hack was something that's much harder to find today, even though it sounds kind of delicious.

• 19:09Speaker 07

  They would make something called conserva nera, which means black preserve. So at the end of the harvest, they would harvest everything off the vines and they would all get together in the, in the streets and put the tomatoes into these large cauldrons and start fires up and boil.

• 19:35Speaker 07

  Them down into a, a thick paste.

• 19:38Cynthia Graber?

  This boiling and thickening would take days. It was almost like a street fair at the time because you did it in a group. You hung out, you gossiped as you stirred and strained out the seeds.

• 19:47Speaker 07

  And then they would spread this thick paste onto wooden boards and leave it out in the sun for several days. And at which time then they could actually go out and roll up this thin sheet into something that probably looks like fruit leather. And they would sometimes form it into blocks.

• 20:09Cynthia Graber?

  In block form, tomato conserva narrow would last at least a year, right through to the next harvest.

• 20:15Speaker 07

  And it was still concentrated that you didn't need much to flavor a soup or a stew.

• 20:21Cynthia Graber?

  If you're thinking that this sounds sort of like tomato paste, it's really a different thing. They're both concentrated tomatoes, but conserva narrow was nearly black, as Bill said, and it was tough and you had to slice off a piece. Nikki and I actually looked for some online and there are things from Italy called conserva, but they're more like lightly sweetened tomato spread, not this hard, tough tomato leather. But if you know where we can get some, please let us know.

• 20:43Nicola Twilley?

  In any case, finally, finally, the tomato had found its place in the sun, at least in southern Italy. The story of how it took pills and tins to get big in North America, coming up after the break.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  I'm Josh Mucio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building 8Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see.

• 21:25Speaker 07

  They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  We've got deep tech to change the weather.

• 21:32Speaker 06

  Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  What if you wanted to not make it rain somewhere else? Like one day we're just like, screw Arizona.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  And dairy?

• 21:44Speaker 04

  I never imagined my life journey would be milk.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.

• 21:56Speaker 07

  When is the end of the day and you're settled into the couch looking for your evening? You're not looking for Homework the Movie. You're looking for comfort, excitement, or something in between. Whether you're craving something familiar or in the mood to discover something new, Amazon Prime has what you need, from screen to doorstep. Because it's not just about genres or endless content. It's about finding the thing that matches how you're feeling, whatever the mood. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 23:07Cynthia Graber?

  In the US, a few brave souls were fond of tomatoes. They were better known in the South. Thomas Jefferson grew and ate them, but my fellow New Englanders were generally not fans. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared them "an acquired taste."

• 23:19Nicola Twilley?

  And then came tomato mania.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  It was kind of a quirk. It happened in 1834. A kind of failed doctor named John Cook Bennett, who had been fired from one medical school, had failed to start his own school, gave a lecture to his medical students about the health properties of tomato.

• 23:43Cynthia Graber?

  In general, medicine wasn't particularly advanced at the time, so people were always looking for something to make them healthier. But Americans were particularly health-obsessed at that moment because they were in the middle of an epidemic of cholera.

• 23:55Speaker 07

  So after Bennett published this lecture, 200 American newspapers uncritically picked this up and printed this. Now, it didn't take long for the snake oil salesman to realize that there was an opportunity here. And one in particular, an Ohio merchant named Archibald

• 24:19Speaker 07

  Miles had been peddling this worthless pill, which he called American hygiene pills.

• 24:27Cynthia Graber?

  Archibald Miles encountered John Cook Bennett's viral tomato article, and it gave him a couple of ideas.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  Shortly after, Miles printed up some new labels, awarded himself an M.D. degree, and Dr. Miles' compound extract of tomatoes was born and sold like hotcakes. Were there any tomatoes in this? Probably not. If there were, it was very few.

• 24:56Cynthia Graber?

  Once these compound extract of tomato pills started to get popular, they kicked off a tomato pill trend. It was like sun-dried tomatoes in the 90s. These pills were everywhere.

• 25:05Nicola Twilley?

  Americans loved nothing more than a health fad. The supposed wonders of tomato pills in turn inspired a craze for growing tomatoes. And before you knew it, the U.S. was in the grips of a full-blown tomato obsession.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  We have a wonderful journal entry of a British journalist who visited a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, and complained that he was being served tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, dinner. And people were eating them at breakfast with mustard. And he said he nearly lost his own breakfast. And I mean, people just went tomato wild.

• 25:47Cynthia Graber?

  Americans grew and sold tomatoes. Everyone was eating them. But the problem was that tomatoes weren't available all the time.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  You know, if you've grown tomatoes, you know that their habit is they come in slowly. And then, all of a sudden, you get a couple of hot days, and they come in like gangbusters. And when that would happen, there would be a glut. And the price of tomatoes would drop so much that they would just sometimes plow them into the fields.

• 26:19Nicola Twilley?

  Fortunately, at about this time, the next big breakthrough in food preservation was ready for prime time: canning. And that is a whole other story that we're coming back to in a whole other episode. But the point is, tomatoes were finally beloved.

• 26:35Cynthia Graber?

  They were so beloved that people weren't content with eating the fresh ones in the summer and early fall, and the canned ones in the winter and spring. No. Northerners wanted their fresh tomatoes all year round. And so the answer was Florida.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  They grew them in the wintertime because the weather was much milder. They put them on trains and shipped them to New York and Boston. And so it basically took over.

• 26:57Nicola Twilley?

  This is Harry Clea again, and he spent much of his career in Florida growing tomatoes.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  You know, the reality is, in New England, the season for growing tomatoes really is only, basically, if you're lucky, the end of July through September. So what do you do the other nine months? You import them. And so Florida filled that niche, and it did it very well.

• 27:20Nicola Twilley?

  In some ways. Because while Florida has its charms, and mild winters are certainly among them, it's not actually paradise for tomato.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  So the thing about Florida is that the soil is extremely poor. Well, it's sand, very little organic matter in the soil. And so, yes, it's a good place to grow them because in the wintertime and the fall and the spring, you can grow them. You can get two crops a year. But you have to completely irrigate them. You have to flood them with nutrients constantly because there is nothing in the soil. Basically, it's almost like growing them hydroponically. The soil is an inert substrate to hold the roots in place.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  It's also not the greatest place to grow them because much of the year it rains a lot, it's very humid, disease pressure is tremendous. So basically, the only thing really going for tomato is the temperature. Otherwise, it's not a very good place to grow tomatoes.

• 28:29Cynthia Graber?

  But that temperature was a draw. The sandy soil didn't hold the rain, so farmers just developed irrigation systems. They also had a very intense regimen of fertilizer and pesticides and fungicides. They literally had to disinfect the soil. Not ideal environmentally, but it works.

• 28:43Nicola Twilley?

  And at the same time, plant breeders worked on developing a tomato plant that could thrive in these challenging growing conditions and deliver tomatoes at industrial scale.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  For Florida specifically, most of the breeder programs focus on disease resistance and yield. Labor is probably the biggest single expense for growing a tomato, so you want a plant that produces fruit in very large quantities in a very short period of time.

• 29:13Cynthia Graber?

  The other thing about the Florida tomato industry is that those tomatoes had to be picked before they were ripe. They had to be green and very hard.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  You know, they can fall off a truck and not really be damaged. And that's the big thing they want because it goes through so much handling. As soon as the tomato starts to ripen, a whole series of genetic events occur. And the biggest one, of course, is softening. And ultimately, if they're softening when they're in the field in Florida, they're really not going to get to Boston or New York in any shape that's worthy of selling.

• 29:48Nicola Twilley?

  This is all still how Florida tomatoes are grown today. Fumigate the soil, douse them in lots of pesticides and fertilizer. And then, when it comes to harvesting, pickers go through and just grab every piece of hard green fruit that's the right size.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  So they're, they're pretty much manhandled. I mean, you're, you're not talking about delicate process here. They're, they're ripping them off the plant, throwing them in a barrel, and then throwing the barrel into the bin where they're stacked four feet high.

• 30:17Cynthia Graber?

  Tomatoes are disinfected in the packing house, and then they go down a conveyor belt so that only the largest ones pass through.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Ironically, anything that's particularly colored, like it's pink or has, has distinct ripening on it, is taken out and thrown away. Because they want something that's going to last a long time.

• 30:36Nicola Twilley?

  The ripening is done much later in specialized ripening rooms, right before the tomato goes on sale.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  The whole system was developed to basically get you a tomato from very long distances and have it survive all the way to the retailer, who then puts it on their shelf and hopefully just in time for you to buy it.

• 30:56Cynthia Graber?

  All of this, the whole setup, it got lots of tomatoes to consumers all year round, but it ended up neglecting one important thing: flavor.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, totally flavorless.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, I mean, anything tastes better than Florida tomatoes.

• 31:10Nicola Twilley?

  The American grocery store tomato has been the subject of as many harsh words as those early tomatoes in Europe. Chef James Beard called them "an almost total gastronomic loss." Critic Craig Claiborne described them in The New York Times as "tasteless, hideous, and repulsive." Hard, plastic, watery, blah, the poor Florida tomato has heard it all.

• 31:34Cynthia Graber?

  This is a tragic outcome for what is one of the most popular foods in the world. The problem, at least when it comes to Florida, starts with the sandy, nutrient-free soil they're grown in. As Harry said, it's almost like they're being grown hydroponically.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  There's no question that terroir is a factor. I mean, we know, for example, we can grow the same tomato hydroponically in our greenhouse or in the field, grown at exactly the same time. We harvest them, we give them to consumer panels. The ones in the field will taste much better.

• 32:06Nicola Twilley?

  So Florida soil is making the tomatoes taste like nothing, but so is the practice of harvesting them while they're green.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  The further along in the ripening process it is, the better the ultimate flavor. When you're picking something that's immature green and taking it off the plant and ripening it artificially, you just don't get the same flavor. The longer it stays on the vine, the better.

• 32:30Cynthia Graber?

  This is because tomatoes get their nutrients and sugars from the leaves. And if the tomato is picked off the plant before it should be, it's missing out on a lot of days it should be beefing up its nutrients and flavors.

• 32:40Nicola Twilley?

  But the truth is that these tomatoes- Wouldn't taste great, even if they were grown in good soil and picked red and ripe.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  They would taste acceptable.

• 32:49Cynthia Graber?

  Harry says acceptable, but I'm not convinced. And honestly, I'm not sure Harry really feels that way because he knows the truth about those tomatoes.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Breeders have not selected for flavor.

• 33:01Nicola Twilley?

  Basically, just like I don't have the genes to be an Olympic sprinter, industrial tomatoes just do not have what it takes to taste good. The breeders who worked so hard to make the tomato flourish in Florida weren't focused on that.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Flavor is just so down on their radar that they have neglected it for years. So we've done these studies. You can take the commercial tomatoes. You can grow them in your field, right side by side beside an heirloom tomato. Let them fully ripen, pick them and bring them back to our taste panels. And no, they do not have the flavor of an old variety, an heirloom variety tomato. They have lost flavor. There's no question of that. You know, it's just as simple as if you ignore something over 100 years of breeding, you randomly end up with something that's just not as good.

• 33:59Nicola Twilley?

  No one intentionally developed a flavor free tomato, but that's what happened. In their quest for yield and disease resistance, they accidentally bred out all the deliciousness.

• 34:11Cynthia Graber?

  We're blaming the breeders here and the growers, but the truth is we're also at fault.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  The consumer is not without blame here. You know, consumers want that tomato year round. And the system has, has built itself to give them what they want. If you want a tomato in January, you're going to have to buy a commercial tomato.

• 34:32Nicola Twilley?

  And lots of us turn out to be perfectly satisfied with that watery, plastic, blah tasting, commercial tomato. Or at least not bothered by it. Part of that is how those tomatoes are being used. Some end up in the grocery store, of course, but most are destined to become just a slice in a deli sandwich or burger. Honestly, more for color than flavor.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  The majority of Florida tomatoes go to the commercial food industries. So they end up in restaurants. They end up on food chain burgers. They end up at Taco Bell.

• 35:10Speaker 07

  That's one reason why they're so bad. Because the buyers know that people are not going to decide whether they're going to Burger King or McDonald's based on the tomato on the burger. What they care about is are they a penny a pound less from this farm than they are from that farm? So there's tremendous pressure to keep prices low and there's tremendous pressure to make sure that the tomatoes arrive in perfect condition.

• 35:46Cynthia Graber?

  And no pressure to make sure they taste like anything. But so is it possible to ever buy an industrial tomato that actually tastes good? That's coming up after the break.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  What's on their wish list? It probably smells incredible. Gift them Seoul De Genetto's Shea Rosa Perfume Mist. Light, playful, and delicious scents for every mood and moment. Shea Rosa 62? Pistachio and Salted Caramel. 68? Pink Dragon Fruit and Brazilian Jasmine. 40? Black Amber Plum and Vanilla Woods. Give the gift of Seoul De Genetto's Shea Rosa Perfume Mist. Loved by everyone, perfect for anyone. Shop now on seoldegenetto.com.

• 37:18Cynthia Graber?

  Harry has been working on the tragedy of the tasteless tomato for a really long time.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  So we knew, we knew in the eighties, we knew that the flavor of tomatoes was crap and desperately needed help. So, you know, when we started looking at the system, I thought, oh, well, the big problem is they're just being picked too young. And if we can fix that, then everything will be fine.

• 37:44Cynthia Graber?

  Harry was working for a commercial breeder at the time, and his theory was that if he could slow down the ripening process, tomatoes could be picked when they're riper, and they'd continue to ripen so slowly that they still wouldn't be mushy when they got to the consumer.

• 37:57Nicola Twilley?

  And he was successful. Harry bred tomatoes that ripened more slowly, and it did mean they could spend a little longer on the vine. But no one's socks were being blown off by these new slow ripening tomatoes. So he moved to academia and he went back to the drawing board.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  I think I sort of had this epiphany one day where I said, you know, we're working on indirect methods of making a tomato that has better flavor. Indirect in the sense that we're not working on flavor, we're working on slowing the ripening process down. And I thought, hey, maybe there's a problem with these commercial tomatoes that they just don't have flavor to begin with. And what the hell is flavor?

• 38:42Cynthia Graber?

  This was Harry's new hypothesis at the time. He didn't know yet whether industrial tomatoes even had the potential to taste good. To figure it out, Harry set out on a quest to discover what makes a great tasting tomato.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Anybody who's grown heirloom tomatoes knows that there's no one great flavor. All the different heirloom tomato varieties that people grow, there's no one single recipe for a great tomato. They all are very distinct.

• 39:08Nicola Twilley?

  To narrow in on which of all the flavors that can be in tomatoes are the ones that matter for a truly delicious tomato, Harry surveyed the field. He grew hundreds and hundreds of different varieties, and he created a chemical fingerprint for each. How much sugar and acids each tomato variety had? But also which volatile aromatic flavor molecules and how much of each one? The whole process took years.

• 39:33Cynthia Graber?

  And then Harry and his colleagues took about 200 different tomato varieties that were dramatically different in terms of these chemical profiles, and they also put together groups of eager tomato tasters.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  And we said, okay, we would like you guys to eat these tomatoes and rate them and tell us what you think of them. And we had ratings. We had ratings from this is the best tomato I ever tasted down to this is inedible.

• 39:58Nicola Twilley?

  And with both sets of data in hand, they were able to connect the flavor molecules with people's taste preferences. In other words, they finally had an answer to the question, which chemicals have to be in a tomato for it to taste great?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  It turns out it's complicated. Tomato is a little bit different from a lot of other fruits. If you take something like a banana or a pineapple or a strawberry, there are only a very few chemicals that really contribute. They have dominant flavors. Banana really only has one major volatile chemical that you smell it and it's a ketone that you smell and say, oh, that's a banana. Strawberry only has a couple of chemicals that really give that unique strawberry aroma. Tomato has 20 or more. So it's really a kind of an amalgam in terms of flavor. It's really quite complicated.

• 40:51Cynthia Graber?

  But even having narrowed down the tomato flavor must haves to 20 chemicals, the scientists weren't done. They then had to figure out the genetic pathways in the tomato plant that led to these aromas and flavors.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  So we took all that data and we said, okay, these are the important chemicals. How does the plant make these chemicals?

• 41:09Nicola Twilley?

  And just as he feared, it turned out that these genetic pathways had been more or less bred out of the commercial varieties over the years because, like we said, the breeders weren't focused on flavor. But now Harry had a list of what was missing.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  We developed an average recipe for what we think the best tomato would be. That doesn't mean it would be your absolute favorite, but I think everyone would agree that this is a really great tomato.

• 41:39Cynthia Graber?

  As Harry says, this was based on averages because there were some fun differences in what people in the tasting panels preferred.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  So what we find is that those European descendants tend to like a tomato that's sweeter, less acidic. The volatiles are very important.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Hispanics tend to like something that's a little more acidic, more firm, because they're chopping it up and putting it into salsa, or using it as more of a condiment that has to stand out.

• 42:10Nicola Twilley?

  But the differences go beyond cultural culinary choices.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  We know that older people like tomatoes that have more volatile chemicals in them, that have more aroma. Younger people respond more to just plain sugar. Whereas older people, I kind of think of it as, as you, as you get older, your palate matures and you appreciate more the nuances.

• 42:34Nicola Twilley?

  And apparently, we women also have palates that are particularly sensitive and sophisticated. We also don't want a tomato that's just sweet.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Women are more like the older adults. They like a tomato that's more complex.

• 42:46Nicola Twilley?

  What's also fascinating is that Harry discovered, almost by accident, that all that great flavor also guarantees a tomato that is even more stuffed with nutrients that are healthy for us.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  What we found was that virtually all of the important volatile chemicals are derived from essential nutrients. And that really was, that was a big surprise to us. So, you know, I mean, it'd be almost impossible to prove it, but I, I think that our sort of working hypothesis is we like what's good for us.

• 43:22Nicola Twilley?

  So the next step, which again took years, was to breed seven of the most liked flavored chemicals back into a commercial variety. The goal was simple but beautiful, to have a tomato that had all the attributes industrial growers wanted, but also tasted good.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  In theory, it sounds very simple. In practice, when you're going back to those heirloom varieties to get those good genes, you have to get the good gene out without taking all the bad genes along with it. And so that's the process. That's where it becomes more of a, a challenge. It's not scientifically challenging. It just takes time and resources because we've got to go back and we've got to. Take a small part of one chromosome and cleanly get that into the commercial variety without compromising the yield, the disease resistances, all the things that are scattered through the

• 44:23Speaker 03

  rest of the genome that the commercial growers just won't give up on.

• 44:26Cynthia Graber?

  This sounds like the process for genetic modification, which if he did that, it would be super quick. But actually, Harry's been finding and moving these chromosome parts using standard plant breeding, and it has taken decades.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  That said, I think we've made huge progress. We've introduced all of those genes, and we've done the consumer panels now this past year to show that they really, side by side, they taste better. So we have made a significant improvement. The problem is that the tomato is still a little bit smaller than its than its parent. It's not an acceptable commercial size, but we have all of the other performance. We have the yield, we have the disease resistance. It's only just the size that we don't have back quite yet.

• 45:12Nicola Twilley?

  Now, just to be 100% honest, if a commercial Florida tomato operation was to grow Harry's great tasting tomatoes, the standard Florida way, in totally fumigated sandy soil with no terroir, harvested green and early, they're still not going to taste utterly fabulous.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  They taste better. So we grow our tomatoes in the field using commercial techniques. They're grown exactly the same way the commercial growers grow them. And we can say that they taste better. Does that mean that they've achieved their potential? Absolutely not. I grow them in my garden at home, in a real garden with lots of compost, and they taste substantially better than they do if they're grown in the Florida sand.

• 46:03Cynthia Graber?

  Okay, but here's a bigger problem for Harry and for us. Commercial growers aren't planting his tomato. The difference in size is too big a deal for them, and they're counting every last penny, and a lot of fast food companies have requirements for tomato size. Plus, like we said, the demand isn't there. No consumers have boycotted. Subway or McDonald's because the tomatoes are tasteless. And some of you out there are buying those taste-free tomatoes in the supermarket.

• 46:27Nicola Twilley?

  Harry is semi-retired at this point, but his lab and his colleagues are continuing to perfect this tasty industrial tomato. So the big commercial growers do adopt it. He's convinced they'll get there one day.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I don't think I can consider myself completely successful until you see a great tasting tomato in Walmart, that the people on food stamps can go out and buy and get their kids a nutritious, good tasting product. That'll be the real success. I don't know if that's going to happen in my lifetime, but I think we can make significant progress. We can get stuff that's good enough that people will start to say, oh, this is not plastic. This really does taste good.

• 47:13Nicola Twilley?

  Onwards and upwards. The quest continues.

• 47:16Cynthia Graber?

  But in the meantime, this isn't the only tomato Harry's been breeding. He's also used his findings to breed garden tomatoes for home growers or small-scale commercial growers, and these are popular.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Those were made on a very simple principle, and that is, people want heirloom flavor, but they want the the performance of modern varieties.

• 47:34Nicola Twilley?

  After talking to Harry for my book, Frostbite, I started growing his varieties alongside my regular heirloom ones. And I am not being paid to say this, but his tomatoes cannot be beat for the combination of flavor, super-high yield, and a tomato that actually stays perfect on your kitchen counter for a few days, rather than turning mealy overnight.

• 47:57Cynthia Graber?

  Harry told us about an Amish farmer who grows thousands of Harry's plants and sells the tomatoes to happy customers at New York farmers markets.

• 48:04Nicola Twilley?

  We have the links. If you want those seeds yourself, just go to gastropod.com.

• 48:08Cynthia Graber?

  But while you can't buy Harry's tomatoes at the grocery store yet, the ones you can find there increasingly aren't from Florida.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, I first noticed a few years ago that in my markets in the Hudson Valley, New York, I was seeing tomatoes from Canada in March. I thought, this is, this is weird. What are tomatoes doing coming from Canada? And it turns out, in the last 20 years, Canada has been borrowing technology from Holland.

• 48:42Speaker 07

  And building enormous greenhouses of more than 100 acres.

• 48:47Nicola Twilley?

  I have to say that Dutch greenhouse tomatoes have about the same reputation for lack of flavor in Europe as Florida ones do here. They're in supermarkets in the UK and they're hard, watery, and depressing. But Harry says there are some flavor advantages to the Canadian greenhouse tomatoes.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  The stuff that's grown in, in greenhouses these days is a little bit better than, well, it's actually substantially better than the stuff that comes from the field. Those tomatoes are generally allowed to ripen on the vine.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  And you can put these greenhouses closer to major cities. Tomatoes from Mexico and Florida travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach your supermarket shelf. And some of these greenhouses, the tomatoes are picked on a Monday and they're on a store shelf on Tuesday.

• 49:41Nicola Twilley?

  So that's a positive. These greenhouses also use dramatically less water and fewer pesticides than Florida tomatoes, but they do take a huge amount of energy for the light and heat needed for growing and ripening.

• 49:52Speaker 07

  You don't need to have good soil. You don't need to have lots of sun. What you do need is about $100 million.

• 50:02Nicola Twilley?

  Which is a lot of money. And for my money, the real way to optimize your tomato experience is to limit fresh tomato consumption to the summer months. This may sound extreme, but I don't actually eat fresh tomatoes when they're not in season locally.

• 50:19Cynthia Graber?

  If you can't grow them yourself, try to find a farmer's market. And if you have to buy at the supermarket, look for ones grown as close to you as possible. And really only do this during tomato season. As an experiment, in early spring this year, I bought a full-size round red tomato that I'm pretty sure was from Florida and another one that was labeled New York. But the New York one was just as tasteless, wrong season.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  If I buy a tomato in the winter at all, I'll typically buy the grape tomatoes. They just have more flavor. They're higher sweetness.

• 50:48Nicola Twilley?

  But really, I don't want to sound like a food snob, but in the winter... If you want a tomato that tastes like something, you should use sun-dried, or our favorite, canned tomatoes. Save the fresh ones for summer.

• 51:00Cynthia Graber?

  Speaking of canned tomatoes, we love them so much that we're going to do an entire other episode all about them later in the winter, when they're the best tomato option of all. Stay tuned for why they taste so much better than fresh winter tomatoes, whether San Mozano's are worth the price, and whether you're even getting what you paid for when you buy them.

• 51:20Nicola Twilley?

  If you're wondering what became of tomatoes in their original homeland in Mexico, well, we have the scoop on Gabriela's new project, Tomatoes for Tomorrow, in our special supporters newsletter. You can sign up to support the show and get that juicy story at gastropod.com/support.

• 51:38Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Gabriela Toledo, Bill Alexander, and Harry Cleat. We'll have links to their research, books, and tomatoes at gastropod.com. And you can sign up to support the show and get an invitation to the gastro hang at gastropod.com/support.

• 51:51Nicola Twilley?

  And of course, thanks as always to our awesome producer and fellow tomato lover Claudia Gibe. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another new episode for your listening delight.

• 52:03Speaker 05

  I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For our sweet season 16, we're giving you more of what you love and less of what you don't.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about middleware AI wrappers.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  Software is out. Actual cool stuff is in. We've got consumer brands. We're building 8Sleep for daytime. Hardware that helps blind people see. They kept asking for middle finger. Next thing we knew, we had like 10 students running around flipping each other off. We've got deep tech to change the weather. Our big vision is to make it rain and snow on demand. What if you wanted to not? Not make it rain somewhere else. Like, one day, we're just like, screw Arizona.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  And dairy?

• 52:49Speaker 04

  I never imagined my life journey would be milk.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Season 16 of The Pitch is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This season is presented by Engine.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.