Tomato Love

I suppose that kneeling in the dirt is as good a posture for epiphany as any-better than most, in fact-especially given the nature of the particular epiphany I was enjoying. The fact that it was provided by Mr. Stripey, well, let's leave that for later.

Like most Northerners who become Floridians, I'd existed mostly in a state of smug satisfaction punctuated by moments of joy at the sometimes shockingly sharp pleasures of my new life: coquina drifts, frond rustle, backyard tangerines. Yet there were voids-just a few-to which I'd resigned myself. Autumn color. No surprise, and a small price to pay, especially when softened by relatives' care packages of crisp and crumbling maple leaves. But there was one loss I felt sharply and almost daily: a good tomato.

The rosy-cheeked mounds of tomatoes in supermarket produce sections no longer fooled me. Nor was I taken in by the still-on-the-vine poseurs. One bite-one unnervingly crunchy bite-was all it took to know I'd been had again, deceived by a lovely Stepford tomato and left with a mouthful of what might have been applesauce.

"Can't grow a decent tomato in Florida," some of my foodie friends told me. "It's the rotten soil." Others said it was because the fruits were picked when they were still Granny Smith-like, piled into trailers then gassed until they blushed.

Whatever the reason, I despaired of ever finding the tomatoes of my youth here, with their woodsy, winey scent, their luminous scarlet flesh, their ravishing flavor. And I'd despaired of ever raising my own, either, after sowing some old Burpee favorites with dismal results. Until, that is, I met Mr. Stripey.

Handsomely done up in crimson and copper, he was one of hundreds of cultivars I'd found at Tomato Growers Supply Co. in Fort Myers, a little-known, industrial-park-based purveyor of more than 500 varieties of seed, many of those heirlooms. Skeptical as I was about the ability of my sandy, shelly soil to produce anything-let alone a perfect tomato-Mr. Stripey made me a true believer that you can, indeed, grow a decent tomato in Florida. With bold, tangy flavor and a delicate balance of sugar and acid, Mr. Stripey quickly became a favored member of my hungry household.

But just what is an heirloom tomato? Depends on whom you ask. Unlike the term "organic," which has a strict and specific definition, the government hasn't yet weighed in on what an heirloom is. Generally it's considered to be a variety of domestic plant-tomatoes, in this case-that's existed at least 50 years or more, often one saved and passed down from generation to generation.

"But [the definition] is definitely catch as catch can," says Linda Sapp, who owns Tomato Growers. "There's no general consensus and a lot of gray area."

And now that heirlooms are receiving more attention (they've grown to represent a third of Sapp's sales), there's sort of a frontierish, land-rush mentality, in which a certain amount of lawlessness is to be expected-and let the buyer beware.

"People will take newer varieties and rename them something like 'Aunt Martha's yellow' and try to pass them off as heirlooms," Sapp says. The proof, though, is in the eating. Delicious, juicy and flavorful, they're everything insipid supermarket tomatoes aren't, and growers can count on them to consistently deliver the same taste year after year.

"There's a reason the real heirlooms have been saved-something that's been around 100 years and preserved through families is special and worth having," she says. That hasn't escaped the notice of gourmets on the nation's east and west coasts. Yet even though Florida is the No. 1 producer of fresh market tomatoes in the nation, heirlooms are still scarce in these parts.

"It's like night and day between here and California," Sapp says. "Every restaurant menu has an heirloom pizza or sauce or salad. Even the chain stores carry them."

But they're not impossible to find here. Even though they may not yet appear in every corner Publix, they're starting to catch on. Just ask Dick Nogaj (a Polish name, he says, pronounced no-jay) who raises them on his pine-bordered Harvest for Humanity farm in Immokalee. The operation is based on the notion that workers should be paid a fair wage-at least $8.50 an hour (that beats by about 30 percent what most farm workers earn). Nogaj and his dozen-or-so employees sell several heirloom varieties, including Black Prince, Brandy-Wine and German Queen, to the popular new market/restaurant, Naples Tomato, and to the Ritz-Carlton, Naples.

Since it opened last spring, Naples Tomato has enjoyed solid success with its largely tomato-based menu: soups, pastas and even martinis fashioned from Nogaj's fresh heirlooms. In the market side of the business, buyers can pick their own. Prices range from $4 to $6 a pound.

"They're much sweeter and more delicious," Nogaj says of his heirlooms. "Uglier, too." Not to mention more temperamental. "They're definitely harder to grow," he says, and more susceptible to blemishes and diseases. But what's a little cat-facing among friends? "They're not grown to be perfect," he emphasizes. "They're grown for flavor."

After all, it had to be flavor that induced people to eat what was once widely considered magical at best, poisonous at worst and called sinful-"the devil's fruit"-by the Church of Rome. That may be because the tomato family includes some disreputable members, like deadly nightshade (in fact, the green parts of the tomato are mildly toxic) along with its more solid citizens: potato, pepper, eggplant.

Originally from the tropical Americas, the small, golden early tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the 1500s by explorers returning from the New World, then bred selectively for centuries, giving rise to myriad flavors, shapes and colors ranging from ivory to near-black. These varieties were pollinated naturally, and the resulting seeds passed down through generations.

With the advent of corporate agribusiness, academics and seed company scientists got into the act and started hybridizing tomatoes. This led to disease resistance and enhanced shipping ability-thick hides-but the seeds of hybrids often won't produce the same kind of fruit as the parent plant. A gardener who wanted the same type of tomato year after year couldn't just save seeds; he had to buy new ones from the company. Or quit growing tomatoes altogether.

Commercial growers turned to hybrids as well, since they could grow tomatoes that would last and last, though that durability came at the expense of taste, says New Jersey-born, part-time Naples resident Joe Procacci, who's been in the tomato business 57 years.

A feisty Italian who got his start during the Depression peddling the surplus from his family's backyard garden, Procacci is now CEO of Philadelphia-based Procacci Brothers, which has facilities in several Florida locations, including the Gulfshore. Until recently, though, Procacci had little to offer consumers who complained that their supermarket tomatoes tasted like cardboard.

After years of tinkering with the heirloom French variety, Marmande, in the Naples lab, his team of scientists developed the UglyRipe, a deep-red, deeply wrinkled tomato with the taste "of the backyard tomatoes everyone remembers," Procacci says, and the disease resistance and ability to be shipped of a 20th-century "cardboard" tomato. They grew them in the company fields in Immokalee, along with the round tomatoes-"the kind that are only good for a McDonald's or Burger King" sandwich, Procacci says.

While they weren't enough to send me into rhapsodies, exactly, I can vouch that UglyRipes were a damned sight better than anything-anything-I'd ever tasted in Florida. They were robust, richly sweet and just juicy enough. My family and I happily ate them in pico de gallo, chopped in raw pasta sauce and drizzled with olive oil and flecked with just-chopped basil-anywhere taste really mattered. I even recommended them to my friends up North as the best mid-winter tomatoes they'd ever eat. For a while, I was a hero. Then my friends told me that the UglyRipes had disappeared, just about the same time they went missing in the stores I frequent.

And here's where the story gets complicated. The state's $500-million-a-year tomato crop is overseen by the Florida Tomato Commission (which Procacci helped found back in the '30s). The FTC dictates size, shape and color standards. During the first three years of UglyRipe production, business boomed. But competing growers complained that Procacci's UglyRipes were, well, too ugly-that they reflected

poorly on the quality of Florida tomatoes. So they banned their sales west of the Suwanee River (essentially, from the Panhandle north) last December. Now, with a few exceptions, the tomatoes cannot be found outside of certain parts of Florida.

FTC manager Reggie Brown told USA Today that to allow misshapen, blemished tomatoes to be sold could flood the market with ugly tomatoes. "If you allowed the producers of UglyRipe to ship any quality of tomato, then how could you justify not allowing any quality tomato into the marketplace?" he asked.

Last January, the FTC denied Procacci's appeal of its decision, leaving Procacci with $3 million of tomatoes to dump and uncertainty about how to plant in the future. It was small consolation that he could sell UglyRipes in parts of Florida, since Hurricane Wilma did a number on his Immokalee fields and set him back months, or that they'd become something of an online cause célèbre (a foxnews.com headline: Tomato Tyrants Ban Better Fruit). Until the rules change, my Northern friends must do without, and until the fields recover, so must we.