Photos by Lynette L. Walther
Maine winters as a rule are epic. They are week after week of long, dark nights, ice, sleet, snow, and bone-chilling cold that can get on the nerves, if not wear on the body. But just when the locals are bracing for the worst of what Mother Nature can dish out, visions of balmy summer days and bountiful gardens burst on the scene as seed catalogs—those virtual rays of sunshine on printed paper—start filling up mailboxes. They are like life rings tossed to struggling souls. Warm temps and spring gardens are surely just around the corner. Soon it will be time to begin starting seeds. Hallelulah!
But this year I have a bone to pick with the seed suppliers. It is time we got a tomato with flavor.
Everyone knows that store-bought tomatoes taste like wet cardboard. We understand how taste got sidelined as hybridizers developed tomatoes that ship and store without spoiling. Early this past fall I experimented with one of those store-bought gems. I left it sitting out on the counter to see how long it would last. Two months later, that sassy little bright-red tomato was still going strong, showing no signs whatsoever of rotting, let alone wrinkling. Eventually, after three or so months of its plump, mocking presence in my kitchen, I got tired of seeing it sitting there and chucked it into the compost bucket.
Shoot! The seeds from that bullet-proof tomato are probably just lurking down there among the rotting fruits and vegetables and the fall leaves, ready to spring forth with invincible, insipid, tasteless tomato plants next spring.
We gardeners who grow our own know there have been a lot of so-called “improvements” over the years. There are tomatoes that are more disease resistant; tomatoes that are short on leaves and structure; tomatoes that can grow in containers and yet still produce buckets of fruit; black tomatoes; tiny yellow tomatoes shaped like lightbulbs or sweet peppers. The list goes on. But as the years have passed, we have noticed with increasing alarm that no matter how tomatoes have evolved, that vine-ripened taste we remember just isn’t there.
In fact, it seems to diminish every year. So, this winter, I do hereby announce an open challenge to plant developers, hybridizers, and garden seed suppliers everywhere: We demand—no, we have the right to—a homegrown tomato that tastes like they used to taste!
Bar none, the most flavorful of all tomatoes is the wild one, the true ancestor of the tomatoes we grow today. The internet tells us: “It is known to botanists as Solanum pimpinellifolium, or simply ‘pimp’.” The plant is the origin of all the tomatoes we eat today, and it still grows wild in northern Peru and southern Ecuador. Although the wild tomato is recognized as the tastiest of all, the veggie has its drawbacks—the main one being that the pimp is usually about the size of a blueberry.
Okay, so (some) change can be good. Over time those little pimps were “improved,” until we got the mammoth meaty tomato we can grow at home today. A tomato with the perfect balance of sweet, salty, and sour, that can be cut into nice fat slices that pair so perfectly with lettuce, mayonnaise, and bacon on toasted bread for that Holy Grail of summer sandwiches. (There are also the purists who insist on simply thick slices of tomatoes, good mayonnaise, and sliced white bread.) Eat them as you like, but there is one thing that all tomato gardeners insist on, and that’s flavor. It is, after all, why we go to the bother of growing them!
But recently many of us have realized that no matter how we improved the soil in our gardens, no matter how we primped, pruned, and fussed over them, the plants have started to fail us—even though the tomatoes look just fine. In fact, they look exactly like those of our youth, maybe even better. But the taste is gone. I don’t have to tell you about it. You already know. But why is it? What happened?
The answer is simple. It is you that changed, not the tomato.
Let’s return to the internet for help in trying to fathom why home-grown tomatoes just don’t taste like they used to. Here’s what I discovered: “Between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of taste buds decreases, and the rest begin to shrink, losing mass vital to their operation. After age 60, you may begin to lose the ability to distinguish the taste of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter foods.”
Now do you understand why I am beseeching tomato developers everywhere to come up with a Senior Citizen Tomato? Our new tomato will be bred to compensate for our loss of taste buds. It will grow with a mega-dose of tomato flavor. In fact, it will have a piquancy so assertive that anyone under the age of 55 will simply not be able to tolerate it.
It’s going to be a challenge. There’s no doubt about it. But if we can land a helicopter on Mars and make it fly in that rarefied atmosphere, why can’t we have a tomato with zest? There is a ready market for it. In the United States alone, the population of those 55 and older numbers 34 percent. Those over 65 are one in six Americans. And get this: The rest of the population is getting older every year, right along with us!
The time is ripe to bring on the flavor.
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Lynette L. Walther, is an award-winning garden writer of a certain age, and a MBH&H contributing editor. She grows tomatoes and other things in Camden.
