Growing Perennial Tomatoes in the Desert, Part 3

Growing Perennial Tomatoes in the Desert, Part 3:
Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President

March 8, 2008

The past few days we have harvested two or three tomatoes a day and eaten them right afterwards. Some right then after washing, like apples. Some cut up in salad. None cooked—they are too good to cook. They are SO tasty!!! Beefsteak tomatoes, Early Boy and Early Girl tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, medium-size generic-looking “salad” tomatoes, and Roma tomatoes I have recognized among ones that got ripe already. Watching them ripen a few a day has made me start thinking of what I learned when I was in college at Cal Berkeley taking human genetics: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

I know most people don’t think that, when they are harvesting and eating great tomatoes, in the desert or anywhere else. OK, so I’m a little bit weird compared to other people. That’s not news to me. I’m comfortable in my own skin these days. It’s so nice getting older and realizing you did quite well compared to a lot of those people you were trying to copy when you were younger, and besides that, life is not a contest where there is one set way to win. Each of us can win in our own different way.

Anyway, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was a phrase I went around saying for awhile trying to impress people with how much I had learned in college–strike that, at the World’s Greatest University, thank you very much. I don’t remember thinking about it more than twice since I was that 19-year-old full of myself, over 40 years ago. However, suddenly it came into my mind when I was looking in a tomato vine the other morning and saw one ripe tomato with five other green ones around it.

I just googled and read the wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory. Not surprisingly, everything I remembered about the phrase except the general idea was wrong. That was good, though, because for me in reference to the tomatoes it was a metaphor anyway. The general idea is a specific member of a species in development during its lifetime repeats stages of evolutionary development of the species it is a member of.

The first thing I was thinking is the way these tomatoes, many different varieties, are all ripening one or two at a time shows one reason why cardboard tomatoes evolved. Think how many tomato vines a farmer would have to grow to get enough vine-ripened tomatoes to sell, when only one or two per vine ripen at once. There had to be a way to get them all to ripen at the same time in order for tomato-growing to become a profit-making enterprise. Enter hybridization to get types that ripened all at once, and at different times. Seeing these individual tomato vines still do the same thing they must have done hundreds of years ago in the wild, then later when gardeners were trying to grow enough to make meals for their families, and still later when farmers were trying to develop good businesses, is exciting. It makes me feel in brotherhood not only with Nature and the soil, but also with generations of people. That’s strange, since the last thing I thought I wanted when I planted those tomatoes was to fit in in any way with people who developed cardboard tomatoes.

Then I thought, besides not ripening all at once, these tomatoes are hard when they’re green and soft when they get ripe. Of course that repeats how they were in history, so technology happened, to introduce something into the process so tomatoes could be harvested hard and put in stores soft. Gassing of various kinds and packing in protective packages naturally resulted.

This morning I was tying up a vine and noticed how really fragrant it was. Not just the wonderful prolific yellow flowers. The green vines too have a distinctive pleasant smell like nothing else. These individual plants still have what their ancestors in evolution had to have to survive, even though a fragrant smell of the plants is not that important anymore. I would tie them up and make sure they got pollinated even if the plants smelled bad or had no smell because it is the fruit I am most interested in. In history, though, if the plants did not smell good, and certainly if they did not have the distinctive smell of tomatoes, the insects that took their nectar around from blossom to blossom did not come to those plants, so they died out. Now, with about 15 different types of tomato vines in our garden, all of them have the fragrant “tomato vine” smell.

Then I started to wonder, how does growing tomatoes in a home garden lead to a different evolution in the future from the one in the past. And will it be better, and/or should we think of intervening in natural processes again the way people did in the past?

Having the tomatoes not all ripen at once is actually a benefit. We can use two or three a day and not face a glut. (Interestingly enough, the reason we had these tomatoes is they were thrown away because there was a glut last summer, as there probably is every summer, so even with intervention in natural processes, the market has not solved that problem.) There may be a time when we have too many tomatoes for just our family to use fresh, so then we can make tomato juice and sauce out of the ones we can’t eat. I even have a cookbook named Too Many Tomatoes, so there must be many other things to do ourselves with extras. If we ever have too many to use even those ways, hard to imagine, I love them so much, we can give them away—which will make us many friends, a good thing–or sell them, making us a little extra money, another good thing.

Dealing with recapitulation of the hard then soft process with these individual tomatoes is easy because we are dealing with a small scale and growing in a place that does not have frosts. We can just wait for hard tomatoes to ripen. That’s a lot cheaper and less scary—what do those gases do to human organs, what do workers applying gases have to face in side effects years from now, etc.?–than gassing tomatoes. It’s also a lot less wasteful and harmful to the environment than wrapping each tomato in something usually plastic.

Having fragrant tomato vines and flowers—even though we don’t need insects to pollinate tomatoes as much as wild tomatoes did—is a nice bonus. We can close our eyes and smell the garden even sitting on a couch in our enclosed patio space almost 100 feet away. It is wonderful.

Another thing I’ve started to think about evolution is people say don’t plant supermarket seeds of any kind because the fruits are hybrids so what you get will not be true to the fruit you liked. When I was planting these seeds, I had not eaten any of the tomatoes. They were all overripe and thrown away when I found them. However, I knew from years—no, decades–of eating such tomatoes that they would not taste like tomatoes of my childhood if I had eaten them. I did not want them to be true to what was being sold! Our experience so far in planting and harvesting a variety of supermarket fruit seeds shows evolution can undo harm. Moreover, if people are worried about losing biodiversity, maybe besides going to all the trouble of saving and planting heirloom seeds, they could just trust Nature to revert to heirloom types or maybe create something even better.

My eyes, taste buds, nose and brain tell me it just might work. Hallelujah!

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This post was first published on Home Grown Food Network’s website
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