On Produce




My last table yesterday wanted a caprese salad. Not surprising; the dish is iconic Italian: tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, olive oil and balsamic. And in Georgia, August is the high holy season for the Tomato, patron saint of summer. What I pulled from the pantry window five minutes lately made me ashamed to serve. The tomatoes were only slightly darker than my nail beds, and the mozzarella I recognized as the opposite of "not soggy, not vulcanized, not tasteless" good mozzarella, as described by a local editor.


I grabbed the sous chef, and jerked my hand in the direction of the offensive plate "What the hell is this? We're in Georgia. In August." My chef was kind enough to feed me the line from the Big Corporate Produce Distributor That You Probably Didn't Know is Owned by a Company That Makes Food for Chili's. The heat is ruining our tomatoes. I'll give you a minute to straighten up, wipe the tears from your eyes, and repeat that little joke to whoever's around. Because to Southerners that's a great joke. The heat. Is ruining our tomatoes. Whew. It gets me going here, in a lab, 24 hours later. Anyone who has grown tomatoes in the South can tell you that, water being sufficient, heat will not hurt your tomatoes.


But here's the rub: these aren't Southern tomatoes. These are California tomatoes. And while California grows lots of great produce, when you take something fragile like a tomato and tell me that it came to Georgia from California, that tells me that the tomato is a product of highly industrialized agriculture.


What's wrong with that? We need food, the more the better right? No. We need food. We do not need a system that selects plants based on their ability to produce lots of fruit that can be transferred from truck to truck on a cross-country trip, at the expense of flavor, texture, aroma, and all of those other hard-to-perfect variables. It's worth noting that flavor, aroma, and texture are why we eat tomatoes instead of potatoes (which, not to be nasty to the potato, store and ship beautifully). Certain products grow better in certain regions. Tomato plants in general like heat, humidity, and for reasons most other plants can't fathom, clay-based soil. But the tomatoes grown in California were selected for California, where there's less heat, humidity, and heavy soil. Thus, when heat shows up, it throws off the development of these already-compromised plants, and I hypothesize that the fruit ripens before it darkens, making tomatoes in August look like tomatoes in January.


When we allow this: when I served that salad, when my customers ate it and paid for it, and when I frequent establishments that don't hold that gargantuan produce distributor to its promise of quality (better to boycott them altogether, but that takes a huge amount of work for a restaurant), when we pay inflated rates at market for high-season produce that isn't high-season quality, we're sending a message: keep shipping my produce from farther than a day's travel away. Keep telling farmers to plant species that produce quantity over quality. And please, keep us ignorant about what we eat. If you've never tasted a good tomato, you won't understand the heresy that is a bad one. You won't get pissed at the machines with tables that insult your intelligence and your palate with some of the absolute merde we're asked to accept as food. You'll be a perfect consumer, and your enthusiasm toward food will vary about as much as what you eat, which is to say, not much at all.


Finally, a little inspiration. They sell to restaurants.