Author Note: Seems like tomatoes are the thing to talk about these days. Food bloggers everywhere are writing about the wonderfulness of the tomato season. We have tomato history at World on a Plate, an overview at a la carte, a gazpacho recipe from elise, and today my post on the taste of tomatoes. I love that we all have a slightly different way of honoring the great tomato!
Last week, I spent some time at the San Rafael Farmer's Market observing customers tasting many different tomatoes at a tasting bar offered by a farmer there. The customers were expressing strong like and dislike for what they were tasting, and would graze until they found one that was perfect to them. Everyone's judgement of the perfect tomato was different. Personally, I was just as happy to watch someone express pleasure as dislike.
Isn't it amazing that a tomato can have such a strong taste that people who generally like tomatoes react with such conviction -- wrinkling up their noses, puckering their mouths, smiling widely, insisting that the one they found is the best.
This experience is the antithesis of the giant tomato crops grown for the mega-corporations: Campbell's, Heinz, S&W, or for the supermarket. These tomatoes are grown to look enticing and perfect. They are picked early, often gassed to ensure a red vibrant color (regardless of the inside taste), have tough skins to survive their long trip, and have less taste than if they'd been allowed to ripen on the vine.
When the makers of tomato food products (ie., ketchup, tomato soup, tomato sauce) grow tomatoes, they strive for a consistent taste so that they can add flavoring and have an exact product each time you buy.
A local farmer recently relayed a story to a group of us: He has a neighbor who grows tomatoes for a very large corporation. One day the two farmers were comparing tomato notes, and the small farmer offered one of his heirloom organic tomatoes to the large farmer to taste. After trying the tomato, the large corporate farmer said to the small farmer, "Come with me, I want you to taste a truly tasteless tomato." The small farmer thought that he must be joking -- all tomatoes have some natural acidity, taste, or something. They drove to the middle of the field, and the large farmer picked a tomato and asked the small farmer to taste it. What he tasted was NOTHING. It looked like a tomato, but the taste was just missing. Everyone knew it, and this was the way that the large farmer was being asked to grow his tomatoes --- the perfect tasteless base for added ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, salt, natural flavoring, and corn syrup.
From what I have heard, this is not just a symptom of the large conventional companies either -- in order to create a consitent product (which Americans insist on), some of the large organic companies are having to conform to the same type of tasteless-tomato idea. In an ideal world, the solution would be to purchase your own tomatoes in the summer and can them, but that is a discussion for a different blog post. The next best solution is to purchase the products you need with the least number of ingredients. Purchase canned tomatoes with only tomato in the can, and then make your own tomato soup when you can.
The next time that you are at a farmer's market tasting tomatoes, and you try one that you just don't like, smile and think about how lucky you are to be trying a tomato that has some flavor!
