Picture courtesy of helpforgardeners.com
It always seemed to center around the tomatoes.
The colorful fruit with a colorful history was not new to its role as a symbol. Originating on the west coast of South America and most likely domesticated in Central America, the plant travelled across the Atlantic shortly after the Spanish Conquest of Tenochtitlan. There, the exotic fruit slowly became a central part of many European cuisines, despite its early reputation in the northern regions as related to poisonous members of the Solanceae family such as henbane, mandrake, and deadly nightshade. Travelling back across the Atlantic with North American colonists, the tomato again met with initial resistance; George Washington Carver’s support of tomato consumption to improve nutrition was largely unsuccessful in rural Alabama, and one popular story has a Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson shocking Boston crowds in 1820 by eating a bushel of tomatoes without dying. In the late 1800s, the now-popular tomato came to symbolize a debate over classification of certain “fruits” such as “cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas” when the British levied a 10% tax on all imported vegetables. Challenged by a tomato grower based on the tomato’s botanical classification as a fruit, the court ruled that these fruits were used as vegetables, not as fruits, in meals. Thus the tomato became a “vegetable.”
A century later the tomato became the center of the biotechnology debate, when the Flavr Savr tomato, which had a marker gene and an added antisense gene to prevent softening of the fruit, hit shelves. It was the first whole food approved by the FDA that had been altered using recombinant DNA technology. Despite little controversy during the approval process, consumer concerns over the potential unknowns of biotechnology used in plant breeding and food led to the removal of the tomato from shelves.
For me, the tomato first symbolized adulthood. My family’s garden was among the 35 million backyard gardens in which tomatoes are grown throughout the United States, and every year my father made me try a cherry tomato. I already liked cooked tomatoes, in the spaghetti sauce that graced our table multiple times a week, and my dad was sure that it was only a matter of time before I took a liking to the uncooked form. Each year, hopeful, I would try the small fruit. Each year, disappointed, I would spit it out, until finally my junior year of high school I found that I suddenly enjoyed the taste.
Two summers later, working in Atlanta where I was attending school, I became a regular at a local farmers market. Georgia is the third largest producer of tomatoes in the country, after Florida and California, and walking mid-summer by a tomato plant as tall as a human, it is easy to see why. This farmers market, however, had the strangest collection of tomatoes I had ever seen; they had ripples and bulges, some were yellow with purple stripes, others were green with red polka dots. They were heirloom tomatoes. Tomatoes, which self-pollinate, quickly become distinct varieties when they are isolated, and heirloom tomato varieties come from towns across Europe and the eastern United States and are as distinct as the tastes of the people who cultivated them. Unlike tomatoes found in most grocery stores, which have been bred to ship well and stay firm, heirloom tomatoes were bred for taste and, I suspect, their interesting coloration. I had never tasted anything so intensely tomato-flavored in my life. Suddenly, the tomato seemed like the incarnation of everything the industrial food system, which needed consistency, high yields, and, over everything else, long shelf life, had robbed from us in taste.
Perhaps that is why I was surprised by the conversation that ensued at the Sustainable Food Summit at Emory in 2008. We were sitting around tables, a motley gathering of involved students and faculty that the school had called together to cobble together our collective priorities. Based on an imaginary budget, we were deciding what changes were worth the extra money; fair trade organic bananas or organic wheat? Grass-fed beef or both eggs and meat from antibiotic-free, free range, organic chickens? It was a particularly useful exercise for Sodexo, which was working to balance our demands for “greener” foods with their bottom line. It was an exercise that Paul Farmer, the doctor who decided that poor Haitians shouldn’t have to settle for whatever care was cost-effective, would probably have hated. After all of the talking, though, we were stuck on the issue of tomatoes.
One girl stood up. “I don’t think the general student population, outside of this room, would be willing to give up tomatoes from the salad bar during the winter.” Some agreed. Some disagreed. A heated dispute began. To me, the debate seemed exaggerated. I have never relished the watery, tasteless “tomatoes” we get in our salad bars in the dead of winter. The question behind the tomato debate, however, was much bigger. How much are people willing to change their eating habits in the quest for sustainable foods?
After all, Americans eat over 18.8 pounds of tomatoes annually per person, a staggering amount of tomatoes, and despite Georgia’s status as a top tomato producer the season is well over before the first students step onto campus in September. As the novelty of Barbara Kingsolver’s quest to eat only locally produced foods in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle showed, foods carried from faraway places are as ingrained in our diets as tomatoes are in Italian cuisine. Teaching a group of college students to make apple butter last fall, almost none of the students had never done any sort of food preservation more complicated than freezing. The idea of eating what can be produced in my own region doesn’t seem so strange to me, but not everyone is ready to try Barbara Kingsolver’s experiment. A few weeks ago at training for an environmental education position I have this summer, the trainees took a trip to the local cooperative to stock up on food for the week. Most of us were young, reared middle-class, environmentalists, and saw a wealth of meal options in the vegetables, granola, and soy products that graced the shelves. One older Detroit resident, however, walked through the aisles with increasing frustration, and finally asked if anyone else wanted to go with her to Safeway. “There’s nothing to eat here!” she exclaimed in frustration.
At a University that has to provide food for people of many backgrounds, from many places, just how much people are willing to change their eating habits is a serious concern. Most of the students at Emory would not consider a salad bar full of kale or sautéed rainbow chard a real salad. In fact, half of our students had probably never tried collard greens before stepping into the Emory dining hall. Does that mean, however, the goal of our local foods movement should be to change as much of our sourcing as possible without changing the way our meals look? Over the last two years, I watched Washington apples in the dining halls change to Georgia-grown apples, Tyson chicken become locally raised free range chicken, and saw small stickers appear on the prepackaged salads telling students whether the contents were organic, local, or fair trade. The changes have been numerous, but subtle.
On one hand, swapping out local apples or free-range chickens is still a major improvement, the first big step towards our goal of 75% local or sustainably grown food by 2015. Especially when Georgia’s smaller organic farms do not have yet have the capacity to provide that 75%. Our purchasing power has a huge impact on the local farming community, the environment, and, when we buy fair trade, on farmers abroad as well. However, there is one important part that gets left out when we focus on changing how we source our food without disturbing the students. Teaching. Not the kind of teaching that happens in a class, we have a class that looks at the environmental and social implications of the foods we eat. The kind of teaching that happens with our mouths, with our hands, with experience.
Schooling, after all, was intended in the United States to give us the building blocks to be useful citizens. Especially with liberal arts institutions, university is often viewed as giving us the tools that we will use later in life. With foods, that means having some sort of a model of what eating locally and sustainably looks like, having some idea of the sorts of foods that can be made with those weird sounding winter greens like kale and chard. That means quietly, slowly, getting students used to the better taste, and then the better economic, social, and environmental aspects, of local foods. That way, when they go out into the world four years later, maybe they will reach compulsively for the can of organic tomatoes that costs an extra ten cents, or stop at a farm stand to grab a bunch of that colorful rainbow chard they grew to enjoy. Maybe they’ll even become an advocate at work or at local restaurants for changing the way we get our food. Only by looking beyond the University’s purchasing power, to the purchasing power of the students, their future workplaces, and everyone they might touch in the future, do we really fulfill on our place as an institution of higher learning.
A year later, having failed (for now) to eliminate tomatoes from our winter salad bar and having and to change one of our food stations to serve only seasonal dishes, as an example, I stood before a room full of student food activists at the Southeast Real Food Youth Summit. I had been asked to speak about student involvement in changing the way we grow, process, and deliver our foods. As I spoke about the type of learning that happens through our mouths, through our hands, I found myself once again talking about tomatoes.
But I wasn’t the only one. A representative of the Student Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers stepped up to speak about modern day slavery in the tomato fields of Florida, and their efforts to have fast food restaurants, and now University dining halls, pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes for the workers.
Once again the tomato had become a symbol of something much bigger.
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