True Love and TOMATOES

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It was creepy. Ours were a month from the store (who knows how long from the vine) and still looked fresh. That's unnatural, folks, if you think about it. In another two weeks, they were reasonably firm, red and unblemished on the outside, but finally softened to a sour and unpalatable jelly inside. The bizarre Dorian Grey life of that tomato and many others we tested was just part of the information we needed to launch a private war against genetically altered food (see "Brave New Food," MOTHER March/April 2000). As with all garden battles, the first steps to victory are made towards better seed.

Varieties

The original tomato: Lycopersicon esculentum, of the family Solanaecae, was (and still is) the small, hollow/seedy, fuzzy-skinned and barely edible fruit from vines growing along the coast of what today is modern Peru. Birds and sea turtles carried the seed to the Galapagos Islands out in the Pacific and across the equator to Mexico, where the ancient Mexicans reselected and bred them with the local tomato or husk-tomato. In the mid-16th century, Spanish conquistadores took the seed to Europe where the plants' membership in the often - toxic belladonna family branded them poisonous. They also earned a reputation as an aphrodisiac (thus the name "love apple"). Returned to the Americas with early colonists, they remained a novelty until Thomas Jefferson recognized the edibility of the fruit and began selecting and breeding plants for better eating quality.

Two hundred years of continued reselection and a generation of hybridizing and genetic engineering have brought us a huge variety of plant types and fruit characteristics, from grape-sized to supergiants. Reliability varies among open-pollinated Heirloom seeds, well-accepted cross-pollinated hybrids, and the modern gene-spliced varieties selected from unknown breeders and name seedhouses alike. Read literature about seeds and started plants carefully before ordering. Though the list of our favorite varieties (beginning on the right) will get you off to a good start, you'll have to investigate the best seed for your specific location.

If, like us, you have doubts about the wisdom of modern gene-splicing (attaching a gene from a cousin such as a potato, corn or wild tomato), you can pick from scores of open-pollinated heirloom varieties from many lands and cultures, or "old-fashioned" hybrids from an earlier era. It is always an option, however, to subscribe to cutting-edge plant gene science. One recent discovery is the Mandarin Joy Hybrid Oriental Tomato VFNASt., a 72-day, sub-acid fruit specifically engineered for stir-frying. It yields massive crops of unifonn fruit on a self-size-limiting determinate plant.

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