Homegrown Tomatoes
Well, tomatoes have been in the news. People are getting sick in America from eating tomatoes. How can that be? Is it some nasty stuff farmers are feeding the plants to increase yield? Meanwhile out in back of Anchovy World Headquarters, my tomato plants are looking mighty fine. The weather has been excellent for them and the plants are getting big and sturdy and there's going to be a lot of fruit.
I love homegrown tomatoes. Did you know that Guy Clark wrote a tune in praise of the homegrown tomato, called, you guessed it, Homegrown Tomatos. Here's Guy (sorry, it's just a snippet of the tune):
I think John Denver did a cover of this tune, didn't he?
5 comments:
The cherry tomoatoes on our balcony are doing really well and the regular tomatoes in the garden are...well, they're still there. No sign of fruit yet. Every day listening to the news it makes me happy that I'm growing some of my own this year.
Oh yeh, nothing better! Love a nice thick bacon, thick sliced tomato sandwich ....yum! Yep, I've grown some this year - not enough - and glad I did - but my season here is ending while yours is beginning. In the meantime, don't eat any imported ...........!
Ah yum, food my favourite topic!
It's completely craxzy about the tomatoes and no body seems to be making any jokes about killer tomatoes. Stagg's dad was all freaked out and he said we wouldn't be able to find any tomatoes at the grocery store. It's not all tomotoes that have the samonella. Cherry, grape and some heirloom tomatoes can not get the stuff. The samonella is unusual because it climbs down the stem of tthe blighted fruit.
Did you know tomatoes are one of the earliest "Frankenfoods"?
They were hairy icky seedy berries of a nightshade family but Spain continued to mess with them and breed them and hybrid them to be come edible.
There weren't very many tomatoes at the mainstream grocery store...but the store didn't seem to completely lose their mind and had the varieties that weren't affected by the outbreak. People go a little nuts over these things.
An important reminder is the importance of diversity in food...only some tomatoes were blighted. A lesson from the potato family...if you are going to mess with nature and grow food...make sure to not just grow one strain of a plant. Protecting all strains of plants means some won't be fallen by disease...we can hope..
I'll try to clarify the tomato/salmonella issue a wee bit. Salmonella is an animal borne bacteria and it cannot get onto a tomato by itself. Someone or something has to put it there. No varieties or types of tomatoes are immune. If I spray salmonella bacteria on cherry tomatoes then that bacteria is on them large as life. This has nothing to do with genetics or biodiversity. Some bozo allowed his crop to become contaminated and yes the problem likely will be traced back to a single farm with crappy management practices. The issue here is one of scale. If you are a Toronto resident you likely have driven through or past the Bradford marsh where many of our local vegetables are grown. You might not realize that the average farm in this area is likely less than 50 acres. In the USA vegetable farms work in a different snack bracket. For example a "big" lettuce grower might operate 13,000 acres. If he screws up he does it on a biblical scale. In the vegetable farming business climate/growing season rules. In California for example harvests start in our winter at the south end of the state. Tens of thousands of acres are grown and harvested all at once. Then the harvest, the equipment and the labour will move north 50 miles and harvest from a different area and as the season progresses they keep moving farther north. The issue here is that while the season is "on" at a particular place stuff like irrigation water gets shared. Contaminate the irrigation water and you contaminate the crops of a bunch of serious players. Think thousands of truckloads of tomatoes. The good news is that if you wait a couple of weeks the harvest will move north to a place where maybe there is no salmonella. This link might help explain a bit more: http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/
Tomatoes are a funny crop. American field grown tomatoes are harvested mature but GREEN. Our grocery stores refer to these tomatoes as "vine ripe" Hard to believe but it is true. The tomatoes are packed green into 25 pound boxes, loaded onto an 18 wheeler, the truck box is filled with ethylene gas and the doors are closed and immediately the truck starts its journey to Canada. The ethylene greatly accelerates the ripening process and after about 24 hours the driver is required to stop, open the doors , and let the ethylene escape and then he carries on. When the tomatoes arrive in Toronto they mostly are just starting to show some pink and they ripen the rest of the way to red after they come off the truck. Vineripe. Greenhouse tomatoes from Canada are harvested pink and naturally ripen by the time in the store. Greenhouse tomatoes from Mexico or South America are something I dont much like to even think about. Grape tomatoes are mostly grown in greenouses and in general greenhouses escape many of the large scale irrigation processes and might be less likely to get contaminated with things like salmonella and E.Coli. In my view greenhouse crops present a larger risk of pesticide contamination because scale is smaller and under less scrutiny.
In my opinion (I'm a Torontonian) California produce might be the safest in the world. Scrutiny is high and the stakes are high enough that shippers wont knowingly mess with poor or contaminated product.
Oh hi Joe...sorry to take so long to read your comment.
The last thing I expected was anybody to take interest in speaking about the horros of farming with me. heh heh.
I didn't bother to explain why grape and cherry tomatoes aren't getting the salmonella...frankly...when I talk about food no one has ever been interested so I was trying to not write a lot of details. ha ha!
One of the reasons this particular salmonella outbreak is a problem and why it is affecting certain tomatoes and not others is it seems that this salmonella has traveled down the stems of some tomatoes...and into the flesh of the fruit. Therefore it can not be washed "off".
I didn't say that it didn't or couldn't affect all tomatoes...but it isn't affecting the grape and cherry tomatoes...in part because of the way they grow and where they grow.
I am dead against farming at any rate and many of the places where food comes from in your descriptions above, I have rarely ever purchased. I've been eating organic small set locally grown food almost exclusively since I was a kid...except when eating out.
I lived on a ranch...and learned first hand how tragic farming really is and how terrible it is for the environment...made me become an advocate against most mainstream farm methods...and return to hunting and gathering by the age of ten.
Joe, Although I agree with you about the large scale totalitarian farms you mention and their risks I do not agree with you that this salmonella outbreak does not have anything to do with reminding us about biodiversity and genetics.
How and where and why in what way we grow (or find) food is a part of the factors of biodiversity. If you prefer, think of it under the header of ethnobotony. Fortunately the organic and greenhouse grape tomatoes and cherry tomatoes were grown separately or they may have gotten exposed to this outbreak.
What I have spoken about with all of my friends and family, for better or worse, all of my life...is now becoming mainstream knowledge. When we invest all of our energy to getting food in one way...through large scale industrial farms we are closing off our options for survival.
Biodiversity includes where foods are grown, how and also the most obvious...protecting as many branches of a plants history and family as possible (this for animals as well).
I greatly appreciate your interest in this topic...as a matter of fact...I have two recent posts dedicated to farming on my blog.
One hoping that the formal apology of our government (I am Canadian) to hunterers and gatherers might inspire more people to see the damage that the mindset of farming has wreaked on humans for the last ten thousand years. Hopefully some more people will consider investing in a less damaging way to make a living.
I believe our relationship to food and how we get it is the root of how we live with each other.
And the second post I made about farming is a subject dear to my heart..the abandonment of wilderness and countryside for farms and have farms inside urban settings..."vertical farming"...
California may have great produce but I think Californians should buy that produce.
I hold much higher hopes for "greenhouses" than you do Joe. I believe we can have many incredible options while cutting down petroleum use...and using organic methods to grow food in a very healthy kind of "greenhouse" with vertical farming in our urban centers.
Lets learn from hunter gatherers now that we have seen our mistakes and apologized to them...and get our food production out of the wilderness.
Wilderness is for hunters and gatherers and wild animals....not farmers.
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