cover image Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato

Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato

Arthur Allen. Counterpoint LLC, $26 (291pp) ISBN 978-1-58243-426-1

Aside from a few mouth-watering odes to its color, shape, and texture, D.C.-based journalist Allen takes a technical approach to tomato appreciation, telling a story primarily about agribusiness through a single popular crop, examining its travels from a seedsman's greenhouse (or lab) to kitchen tables. In accessible but sometimes pedestrian prose, Allen (Villain) meets with many farmers, breeders and canners, examining historical developments and their impacts on various aspects of the industry, for instance the conditions that allowed California to increase its tomato yield from two million tons in 1965 to 11 million tons in 2000. Sections on University of California agriculture professors and vital tomato breeders Jack Hanna and M. Allen Stevens prove educational, as do chapters on field workers in Florida (where the tomato is the number three crop behind oranges and sugar) and on consumers in Italy (as recently as a century ago, most Italians didn't even eat tomatoes). By tackling the topic from the perspectives of business and science, however, Allen engages his readers' heads more than their guts.