Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Society, and Economy (review)

The authors of this book claim that the tomato's history mirrors a fundamental shift in how we produce, process, market, and consume our food. To make the case, they combine historical research with organizational analysis, case studies, and interviews with growers, seed producers, warehouse operatives, food processors, and store managers. The results are impressive.

It is hard to imagine Italy's cuisine without the tomato sauce, or America's hamburgers without ketchup. But until modern times, the New World's exotic tomato languished in culinary obscurity. It was pressure-cooking, perfected in the 1870s, that changed the tomato's fortunes. In the United States, the tomato played a starring role as Heinz ketchup and Campbell's soup. By 1890, just one pressure-canner machine could turn out forty thousand units a day. By 1906 Heinz was selling five million bottles of ketchup a year and Campbell's more than two million cans of its condensed tomato soup. To get on the shelves of thousands of grocery stores, Campbell's began advertising, its budget increasing from twenty thousand dollars in 1899 to four hundred thousand in 1911, and on to one million in 1920. The tomato was big business. In 1930, the owner of Campbell's, John Dorrance, was worth $115 million, which made him the third-richest man in America.

How growers produced tomatoes mirrored both new forms of business organization and new agricultural technology. To guarantee a uniform product, Heinz and Campbell's told growers which varieties to plant; they supplied the seed, and later imposed a standardized production regimen. In America, tomatoes were produced in open fields. In Great Britain, the tomato was a hothouse affair; by 1898, boiler-heated nurseries at Waltham Cross covered some twenty-five acres. Glass-house horticulture still predominates, but growers no longer have to sterilize the soil. They produce tomatoes hydroponically in rock-wool, without any soil. To boost yields they enrich the atmosphere with recycled carbon dioxide.

Big growers in Great Britain average between fifty and two hundred acres under glass. They leave nothing to chance. For pollination, they breed bumblebees; to parasitize the larva of unfriendly insects, they raise wasps. An "environmental computer" keeps this microecology in balance; it tracks how much water gets dripped on each plant, plus the amount of nutrients needed—all pegged to the plant's life cycle. With the technology used in the 1970s, greenhouse production averaged around eighty tons per acre. Today, yields have been pushed up to well over 240 tons per acre.

Information technology transformed tomato production. It also made the modern supermarket possible. Back in the 1950s, Britain had some forty thousand produce grocers; they got their tomatoes from wholesalers, who bought them at central markets. No longer. Supermarkets make their own deals directly, either with growers or with suppliers. Goods go through regional distribution centers, many of them owned by the big chains. A typical center handles over half a million cases of food items weekly, loading upward of a thousand trucks. Constant flow is the system's imperative. A tomato makes it from the greenhouse to the supermarket shelf in just one day. A century ago, Britain had more than three hundred thousand "fixed shops," 75 percent of which had most of their stock in six items of less. A modern superstore has from thirty thousand to fifty thousand product lines.

In today's fast-paced world, no one seems to eat lunch out, or to cook dinner. We eat at our desks, or in front of the television. The result is a "ready meal" culture. The tomato keeps pace, disguised as pizza sauce or layered into a sandwich. Pizza sales in Britain were worth 178 million pounds in 1999 and 205 million pounds in 2002. The sandwich market is worth over 3 billion pounds a...