by Patricia Unterman

Last June, before the local tomatoes were anywhere near ready, I watched a case of hard, green, "vine ripe" tomatoes turn pink, then pale red over the course of a week on my kitchen counter. During the transformation, they developed no soft spots, no blemishes. At full "ripeness" they were amazingly firm-that was week three-and even during the fourth week they exhibited no sign of decomposition. I think they could have lasted all summer right there on my counter. These indestructible tomatoes had been a gift from Bob Meyer, the president of Meyer Tomatoes, a packing operation headquartered in King City, California.

The Meyer tomato will be familiar to anyone who eats at Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald's or buys tomatoes in a supermarket or at the corner store; or happens to be having a meal in a hospital or school. At their best these tomatoes suggest tomato-hinting at acidity, implying sweetness, promising juiciness. They never fully deliver these qualities. If you shut your eyes and eat a Bob Meyer tomato, you might be hard pressed to identify it. Uniform in size with thick, waxy skin, these tomatoes are bred for appearance and durability, not taste, and are harvested for successful shipping.

The life of these Bob Meyer tomatoes could have started in a drip-irrigated raised bed in the Salinas valley, the product of a contract between the packer, Meyer, and a farmer who raises the tomato to Meyer's specification. The Meyer tomato grows on a knee high bush in fields fertilized with chemicals and weeded by farm workers with hoes. Pesticides are used frugally.

Each bush produces about 60 tomatoes, which are hand picked "green ripe" by workers paid 45 cents per 25 pound bucket. (A picker can fill 60 to 90 of them during a 6 hour day.) Only 25 or 30 of the tomatoes on each bush end up in the enormous gondolas parked on the side of the fields, leaving behind 15 field ripened tomatoes and 10 or so immature tomatoes. This means that 30 to 40 percent of the tomatoes are left to rot in the fields--including the most desirable ones. (Meyer himself told me that he surprised his wife by picking eight of these red, field-ripened tomatoes from the San Joaquin valley. She couldn't believe they were Meyer tomatoes!) These "vine-ripe" green tomatoes are trucked to the massive packing plant and dumped into chutes that feed into tanks of chlorine. After disinfection, they're washed and finally rinsed. The small tomatoes are culled. (Meyer pays to have them trucked away to cattle farmers). The remaining tomatoes are waxed-to add gloss, prevent dehydration and provide a lubricated surface to prevent bruising. Long lines of women standing by conveyor belts inspect the waxed tomatoes as they whiz by discarding those with the slightest imperfection, and sorting for size.

The plant processes 4500 25-pound cartons of tomatoes an hour. The cartons are stored on marked pallets in a warehouse kept cool, but never below 50 degrees, until they are ordered by re-packers or fast food chains. Then the boxes are moved into huge lockers where they are gassed with ethylene, which starts the ripening process. Green tomatoes kept at 68 degrees with 85% humidity will turn full red. The degree of ripening done at the plant depends on where they will be shipped. By the time an order of tomatoes reaches New York five days later, they will just be turning red leaving the packers plenty of leeway. As Meyer told me, he never gets a complaint about taste, only appearance. Food shoppers will not buy an ugly tomato and don't seem to care about flavor.

Despite shipping up to 65,000 cartons of tomatoes a day, Meyer says the tomato business has become unprofitable. Overproduction has caused the price of commercial tomatoes to fall. At the twenty-five cents a pound he gets for them he's lost money for the last five years. So at the end of June, 1998, he shut down his King City plant after forty-four years and moved his whole operation to Nogales, Mexico. There he believes he can produce a tastier tomato in a semi-tropical growing area for less money. His gigantic King City packinghouse is being dismantled.

In August of 1998, a full month later than usual due to a terrible winter of rain and cold, I sat down to a plate of Stony Farm Early Girls, my favorite tomato, in vinaigrette. I had waited long for this moment. These small, deep red tomatoes have toughish skin and rich juice. Their intense tomato flavor resides in this juice, which is high in acid and sugar. I bought them dead ripe at the Embarcadero farmers' market, and even without refrigeration, they stayed perfect for almost a week.

A visit to Stony Farm, a modest eight acre parcel on the ocean side of Highway 101 near Santa Rosa, demonstrates the flip side of tomato production. Don and Shirley Ward, a couple in their early sixties, live next to a pile of black compost in a simple one-story home surrounded by fruit trees. They work four acres of organic garden with the help of a couple of hired farm workers who live in a trailer nearby. In a makeshift greenhouse with a plastic roof, Ward starts his tomato plants from organic seeds, keeping them warm by placing the trays on an electric blanket; protecting them from lizards under a screen; and soothing them with classical music, the music of choice for tomatoes, he claims. In March the Wards prepare the first tomato beds, building little houses for each plant by drilling holes, filling them with compost, staking, surrounding the pole with chicken wire, then wrapping the chicken wire with clear plastic to keep the wind out and the plants warm. Black cloth is laid over the soil to keep bugs and weeds at bay. All weeding is done by hand. New beds are planted several weeks apart through April and May to assure extended production. I stuck my hand into one of the tomato plants. It was twenty degrees warmer in the little house and redolent of green pepper.

All the Stony Farm tomatoes are sold at the Embarcadero and San Rafael farmers' markets. The Wards and their workers pick them ripe and carefully pack them by hand in boxes. They sold, last year, for two dollars a pound and if you don't get to the market early, the Stony Farm tomatoes sell out. The Wards keep track of almost every tomato, revisiting the plants to harvest as they ripen. They spend six days a week working their farm-it's a way of life. They expect this year to be much better than last and hope to have their first tomatoes at the farmers' market around the fourth of July. Look for them, because once you've tasted a Stony Farm Early Girl you'll understand all that a tomato is meant to be.

Editor's note: If you don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area, look for organically grown Early Girl and other varieties of tomatoes at a farmer's market near you.

This article originally appeared in the May 30, 1999 issue of the San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine.




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