A Personal and Cultural History of the Tomato

Source: Cabinet Magazine, Adam Nollmeyer

In It's a Fruit Goddamnit!, from Cabinet Magazine, Barry Sanders gives us an entertaining personal history that blends seamlessly and poignantly with the broader world history of the tomato. His father was a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who began his life in America as a pushcart tomato vendor in Newark in the 1920s. He eventually rose to become the wholesale tomato king of the vast and colourful City Market of Los Angeles from the 1940s through to the 70s. The life of this hard-driving, hard-living produce vendor is recounted with hilarity and grace. Saunders communicates the mixed emotions that a grown child feels for an over-bearing parent: resentment, resignation, and eventual understanding and admiration. We see the ridiculous loud-mouthed kibitzer making it on the streets of Los Angeles; mixing with gangsters and gambling at every spare moment. We are also given the infinitely wise final words spoken on the deathbed of a father to his son. The writing reminded me at times of David Sedaris, at others Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and even Charles Bukowski. Here is 20th century America, in its greatness, possibility, absurdity, and rage.

This alone would have made for a powerful read. But Sanders goes on to present the fascinating cultural history of the tomato. The journey from its origin of cultivation by the Aztecs in 700 AD, to the Campbell's soup can, was long and bumpy. It is astounding to learn how such a staple of the western diet, was for centuries viewed with fear and rancor.

Farmers in England found the tomato unfit for consumption even by wild animals, and grew them exclusively as ornamental plants. For one thing, botanists mistook the fruit's Italian name Pomo d'oro, the "golden apple," for Pomo d'amoro, "love apple," prompting authorities to issue strong warnings against its consumption, as a most potent aphrodisiac. As if that were not damning enough, the British also believed that the tomato was a hallucinogen, which could induce grand visions of flying. This helped to forge a close symbolic connection between tomatoes and those creatures who spent a good deal of time airborne—witches. And since witches had a special talent for conjuring werewolves, it prompted the eighteenth-century botanist John Hill to classify the tomato as lycopersicon lycopersicum, or "wolf peach."

 And here is where the story goes full circle back to the author's father. Early on we learn that tomatoes were primarily sold by Jews. Without implicitly stating it, Sander's shows how this ethnic based commerce was originally based on racism. The more desirable families of produce, such as the apple, were denied to the less desirable of races, namely the Jews. We are reminded how the seemingly random details of culture belie a vast and complex history. To know the history of the tomato is to know much about who we are as a species. This is some of the best writing I've read on the internet, heat up a bowl of Campbell's and enjoy.