True Love and TOMATOES

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By John Vivian.

"Only two things that money can't buy:
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes."
Guy Clark

It is that elusive, piquant aroma that truly differentiates such a homegrown fruit from store-bought. Only so long as a picked fruit remains at the plant's ideal growing temperature range of 65°F to 85° F in open, oxygen-rich air will it remain a living thing that sweetens its flesh and continues to ripen its seed rather than soften, sour and begin to decay.

Modern tomato breeders, growers and shippers have gone far in bringing a convincing approximation of fresh tomatoes to grocery shelves. Just a couple of decades ago, about all we could get were bred-to-be-cube-shaped, slab-sided winter tomatoes that were (and still are) field-grown in Mexico. They were picked while still green, semitoxic and tasteless, then packaged in plastic coffins, wrapped in cellophane shrouds, and gassed with an excess of ethylene gas fumes to redden their skins during their truck ride to northern markets.

Today's premium "Euro-style" greenhouse-grown fruit is left under gro-lites to turn color on the vine and picked along with stem-end green-leaved calyx, russ-stem and all in multiple-fruit clusters. This is all done to convince buyers that they are truly vine-fresh, though they are at least several days from the vine, their time spent in 70%-humidified, low-oxygen refrigeration.

The newest golfball-to-baseball-sized cluster-bearing fruit are bred to redden through to the core and develop a degree of sweetness and a soft internal texture. But since recent (mid-'90s) genetic engineering has improved shelf life, all of it is encased in tough enough skin (epidermis) and flesh (pericarp) to withstand shipping conditions that would turn an old-time vine-ripened garden variety to mush. In a period of several days to three weeks of suspended animation during refrigerated shipping (and a week to another month of store display), they lose the spark of life and the ability to truly ripen seed or flesh any further, along with nearly all of their natural fragrance.

The typical supermarket "fresh" tomato, though vastly improved in shelf life, appearance and eating quality over the past few years, is still DOA - a corpse. It holds its gene-spliced shape, color and superficial appearance of freshness, but gradually loses the flavor, nutrients and, above all, the intoxicating aroma of the living thing.

Last winter, we went out and purchased a beautiful, fully-ripened cluster of small, local greenhouse-grown hydroponic toma toes and put them in the crisper of the fridge. In two weeks, the fruit seemed unchanged from when we brought them home. The calyx - the little round of green leaves in the fruits center - had withered and was beginning to develop white specks of mold. In another week, the stems were dry, but the fruit was un changed except for a slight softness. Other produce of the same age, such as bell peppers and celery, were beyond spoiled. But the tomatoes still appeared fresh-ripe red - and they were tasty even as we discarded their shopping trip companions.

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