Tomatoland Read Free Page A

coast. By 1930, there were twenty-nine thousand acres of tomatoes growing in the Sunshine State.
    That was around the time that scientists perfectedcommercial applications for artificially exposing unripe fruits and vegetables to ethylene, a gas that plants produce naturally as a final step in maturing their fruits. Writing in a 1931 issue of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry ,E. F. Kohman, a researcher with theNational Canners Association, observed that if gassed with ethylene, tomatoes could be picked before they were fully ripened and therefore would withstand handling better than their nongassed counterparts, although he acknowledged: “It should be clearly understood that by no known method of ripening except on the vine can a tomato be produced equal in quality to a tomato fully ripened on the vine.” Although Florida farmers wholeheartedly embraced the idea of artificially “degreening” their unripe crops, Kohman’s concerns about quality were quickly forgotten.
    The person most responsible for ushering in theboom years of the Florida tomato industry was an unsuccessful Cuban lawyer namedFidel Castro. Until the embargo of the early 1960s, Florida tomato farmers faced stiff competition from produce grown on the balmy island to the south. But with a stroke of President Kennedy’s pen in 1962, no moreCuban tomatoes could be had in the United States. Florida wasted no time stepping into the void. In 1960 the state grew about 450 million pounds of tomatoes a year. Within five years, the harvest had increased by 60 percent to 720 million pounds; revenues soared seventeenfold from $47 million in 1960 to over $800 million by the 1990s. Tomatoes had become big business.
    Max Lipman , a European Jewish immigrant who initially settled in New York City, exemplifies this period of expansion. In 1942, he moved to Florida, where he hoped to make a success with a small vegetable wholesale business, buying from local farmers and shipping their produce to northern customers. Within ten years, he had purchased his own land near Immokalee in the southwestern part of the state and was joined in the business by his three sons and three sons-in-law. Playing off the family name, they called their businessSix L’s Packing Company. Four generations later, the company is still controlled by the Lipman family. It grows, packs, and ships fifteen million twenty-five-pound boxes of tomatoes a year from a sprawling warehouselike facility on the outskirts of Immokalee. Six L’s has captured 12 percent of the Florida tomato market, making it the largest of the dozen or so big growers that now raise and ship virtually all Florida tomatoes. Other large companies in the state, likePacific Tomato Growers, Procacci Brothers Sales,East Coast Growers and Packers, andDiMare Fresh, share almost identical corporate histories to that of Six L’s. Launched by ambitious first- or second-generation immigrants, often from small stalls or push carts in northeastern cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, they expanded rapidly in the second half of the 1900s to become huge companies that, even after several generations, are still run by descendants of the founding family member.
    Today’s tomatoes may be big, juicy, and smooth skinned, but on their circuitous journey from the arid hillsides and rocky canyons of coastalSouth America to our dinner tables, they lost many of the genetic traits that were once critical to their survival. The pea-size S. pimpinellifolium and the other wild relatives of modern tomatoes that Chetelat and his team seek out and attempt to preserve are tough, versatile organisms that have evolved disease resistance and tolerance to extreme environmental conditions—genetic traits that researchers can incorporate into cultivated tomatoes, a feeble, inbred lot that, likesome royal families and certain overpopularized dog breeds, need all the genetic help they can get.
    Drop by nearly any farmers’ market on a summer