Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom by John Hoenig

Abstract

Reviewed by: Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom by John Hoenig Robin O’Sullivan (bio) Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom. By John Hoenig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35. Think about all the meals you ate last week. How many contained tomatoes, in a salad or a soup or a casserole or a sandwich? How many of those dishes were topped with a tomato-based sauce, ketchup, or salsa? How often do you eat pasta, pizza, ratatouille, quesadillas, or tacos without any tomatoes? In Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom, John Hoenig, who teaches history at Pennsylvania State University and at Texas Woman’s University, explores how tomatoes came to dominate American cuisine. Tomatoes are not indigenous to the United States. They hopped from Mexico to the Caribbean and Europe before landing in the American colonies. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were fully assimilated in the national diet. Technology played an indispensable role in that journey. Most tomatoes in the United States are mass-produced agricultural commodities. There are the bland, insipid, perfectly round, uniformly red tomatoes available in every grocery store. However, there are also thousands of flavorful, unique, oddly-shaped tomatoes in a multitude of colors available from farmers’ markets and farm stands and community supported agriculture programs in rural, suburban, and urban regions. To explain this dichotomy, Hoenig argues that the tomato offers a vital counterexample to the traditional model of inevitable industrialization, for four primary reasons. First, local forces have always been involved in tomato innovations. Farmers, agricultural researchers, and chefs helped address the quandaries posed by the tomato’s seasonality and perishability in the nineteenth century, allowing Americans to more easily weave it into their diets. Second, the tomato industry remained decentralized as it was growing in the early twentieth century, so it did not succumb to codified branding while it became a year-round, nationally marketed fruit (yes, we generally refer to it as a vegetable). Third, small- and medium-sized firms offering customizable products dominated the tomato industry in the early twentieth century, which meant that tomato consumption actually became more diverse, as individual families cooked with tomatoes according to their own ethnic and palate preferences. Later in the twentieth century, though, large corporations did increasingly control tomato production, thereby subsuming this earlier customizability. Fourth, hand-picked tomatoes, plucked from the vines by home gardeners or local farmers, remain desirable to American consumers, irrespective of the corporate tomato’s ubiquity. There has been an artisanal tomato backlash against the monolithic factory-formed tomato. The tomato was an unlikely candidate to reach the mega-stardom it [End Page 359] enjoys today, since it was seasonal, highly perishable, and unavailable in most of the United States until the late eighteenth century. Although industrialization, standardization, and corporatization are all key elements in the tomato’s triumph, Hoenig demonstrates that, ultimately, this is a story of culinary change. The chapters in Garden Variety cover the early American tomato, dietary and agricultural advancements in the nineteenth century, the development of processed tomato industries in the twentieth century, culinary creativity within the framework of industrialization, commodification of the tomato, and, finally, challenges to the gargantuan commercial food culture. The book’s discussion of how mechanical harvesters developed is particularly fascinating, because the soft, fragile tomato differed tremendously from crops that had previously been mechanized. Specialists from a variety of agricultural fields had to cooperate while breeding and engineering a new tomato plant. While most American tomatoes are produced and processed in a mechanized, standardized, homogenized system, the demand for heirloom tomatoes from small-scale farmers indicates that consumers and activists will continue to combat the industrial food structure while demanding superior quality, freshness, and flavor. Seed savers guard the kernels of treasured varieties in protected vaults. Top-notch chefs feature superlative tomato cultivars in sumptuous dishes at expensive restaurants. Grassroots demand drives the preservation of open-pollinated, non-hybrid tomatoes. Historians of technology will find much to appreciate in Garden Variety. The book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses American history, environmental history, agricultural history, food studies, and the history of...