Tomatoes

I wish I could transport smells over the web. There is no way to do justice to the smell of a tomato plant unless you sniff it yourself.



Close your eyes and try to conjure the smell of green. Except it's stronger than that-- green on a hot summer day, when it should rain but it hasn't yet so everything is a little humid and heavy with anticipation.



Is this all a little abstract for you? I've been spending a lot of time in the tomato greenhouse, so I've got tomatoes on the brain. The plants in the greenhouse are growing so quickly that they're demanding a lot of attention. The vines need to be pruned regularly of any new growth that threatens to become a "sucker", or a branch that gets some ideas about independence and thinks about becoming its own plant. Sometimes I miss a sucker or two-- and soon after that it's turned into a whole new branch. But since a tomato plant is, technically, a vine, and there's nothing holding it up, it flops over and starts to break off. Or it grows near enough to the next plant that it gets tangled. There's nothing to do but cut the whole thing off-- even if it's started to bear fruit. This is a painful thing for me, which I avoid as much as possible-- and inevitably I am punished for my squeamishness with a huge sucker that juts out of the row of plants, with bigger tomatoes that still have to be snipped off.



Yesterday it was totally out of control. The cherry tomatoes at the back of one of the rows, which have been unruly for quite awhile, had finally grown over my head, and the branches had grown so fast that they were tangled around each other and it was hard to tell which sucker was attached to which plant. I wasn't even sure where to start, so I appealed to Bob, the Farm Manager, for help. He went in there and cut off 10 suckers in about a minute-- just walked right in and started snipping without any thought to the fruit that was already growing. He was right, of course-- the plants were so overburdened that Bob's sacrifice of the few will improve conditions for the rest.



I often take home a few fruits from the day's harvest-- always slightly unripe since it's so hot in the greenhouse at this time of year that they would split if left to their own devices. We usually put them in a bowl on the living room table and wait a few days until we have bright red, juicy tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are my favorite-- they have a really strong, slightly tart flavor that fills your whole mouth when you pop them in. There is no better food in the world.



And so it is that I've been rather bemusedly following the national salmonella tomato controversy. Or perhaps it wasn't tomatoes at all-- now the FDA (or the CDC? I think the CDC tried to trace the disease and the FDA is regulating the reaction, but don't quote me on that) is saying the salmonella was in jalapenos. The point was that our system for supplying supermarket tomatoes is such that "responsible officials" couldn't figure out the source for weeks. Acres upon acres of industrial tomatoes in California could have picked up salmonella from-- well, anywhere.



In a typical overreaction, or at least a far-reaching solution to the wrong problem, the FDA has apparently now decided that anything but the food of interest must be wiped out from the farm-- including such things as other plants or beneficial insects. (No, you don't get salmonella from a spider. It's in animal feces. Which begs the question of how animal feces got near tomatoes. Or jalapenos. But never mind.) As usual, the organic growers in California are getting hit as hard as the big farms:



The goal is to eliminate all mammal feces by erecting big fences to prevent wildlife from entering fields and by ripping out vegetation used to buffer fields and streams, even though there is no evidence that wildlife caused the E-coli contamination.

"The effort on the part of FDA and some of the big buyers and the leafy-green handling association has been to try to eliminate wildlife from the farm environment, which is a very difficult thing to do," said Judith Redmond, owner of Full Belly Farm, a small, organic grower in Yolo County, and president of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

"It involves things like the FDA going to a cantaloupe farm and saying, 'Oh, there's a telephone wire above your farm, you're going to have to reroute that because birds could perch on that wire,' " Redmond said. "People in Salinas are putting up fences that are supposed to keep deer and (wild) pigs out at great expense and a huge disruption to wildlife corridors."

She said auditors are now asking for "clean strips - in other words, herbicides. No weeds, no plants, no nothing."

I was alerted to this story by the Ethicurean web site, but the original article was in the San Francisco Chronicle.


I can't even imagine how we would comply with such rules on the farm I'm at. We'd have to fence off all the fields and probably drain the lake, which attracts geese and other animals. And put a roof over the fencing to keep out the killdeer birds that fly around like they own the place. (Oh, sorry, as far as they're concerned they do.) Of course that would probably block the sun, which would negate the need for any regulations at all, since there would no longer be plants. Again, never mind.


And the non-organic agribusiness growers? Probably not a problem. They've used so much fertilizer and pesticide on their land that nothing can live there anyway. (That's just my opinion, but there are plenty of stories about how nothing can live in an agribusiness field.)