Food
Bee Wilson praises the tinned tomato
Published 03 March 2003
The inconstant, ever-changing tomato is a mirror of British capitalism
A kitchen cupboard without tinned tomatoes in it is as good as empty. No trip to the supermarket is complete until you have flung a few of those sturdy red cans, so delicious, so nutritious and so wonderfully cheap, into the trolley as a bolster against hard times.
But all of a sudden, tinned plum tomatoes are much less cheap than they used to be. Only last year, a 400g tin of "premium" tomatoes cost about 30p. Now, it is closer to 50p. This is still tremendous value for such a useful ingredient, one which, as chefs are always telling us, is far superior to watery, out-of-season fresh tomatoes. But for those counting their pennies (and lovers of tinned tomatoes are almost by definition somewhat thrifty), a 67 per cent increase in price in less than a year seems quite a blow. It is also rather a shock to be reminded that something so dependable-seeming and homely as tinned tomatoes can be subject to fluctuations of the global market.
The reason for such a steep rise is that Italian tomato harvests were depleted in 2002 by terrible weather (droughts, floods, hailstorms, everything short of a plague of locusts). This was a setback for Italian farmers, but also for British consumers, who eat more of their tomatoes in canned form than any other country in Europe. If supply dries up completely, we won't know what to do with ourselves. Our air-raid-shelter mentality will be altogether upset. How will we sauce our pasta in emergencies?
In Greece, Italy and Portugal, where the sun bakes tomatoes to delicious sweetness, the people rightly prefer to eat them fresh most of the time. Less understandably, even in Germany, where the fresh tomatoes are usually tasteless Dutch "water bombs", nearly half of all tomatoes are eaten fresh. But we remain wedded to our cans. A new book by three social scientists, Exploring the Tomato (Edward Elgar Publishing), calls Britain the "aficionado nation of processed tomato, with over 70 per cent of its total consumption". I'd like to think that this shows a degree of taste, not just meanness; there are few things more delicious than tinned tomatoes simmered with butter, celery, onion and carrots, unless it's tinned tomatoes simmered with porcini and cream; or with anchovies and garlic; or with bacon and rosemary. But it's more likely that our tinned tomato addiction reflects our attachment to mince dishes than any deep acquaintance with the works of Marcella Hazan.
Exploring the Tomato sees the tomato as a mirror of contemporary British capitalism. The authors give a compelling account of the many ways in which tomato consumption has been transformed over the past few decades, though they are rather too fond of baffling social-science jargon ("For all that it is not subject to universal laws, the tomato is instituted as an 'economic' tomato"). Their main argument is that nothing is constant about tomatoes. The anti-GM brigade, who succeeded in pushing genetically modified tomato paste out of British supermarkets, claimed to be representing a kind of timeless "nature". But the ubiquity of the tomato is actually very recent, and is procured by numerous tweakings of nature. In fact, the latest innovation is the artificial competition among supermarkets for the most "natural" form of tomato farming, with new, non-chemical forms of pest control.
Like everything else in modern British retailing, the tomato has fragmented into hundreds of subtle lifestyle choices: sun-dried, sauced, bottled, concentrated, extra large for slicing. In one branch of Tesco, the authors found no fewer than 16 different kinds of fresh tomatoes, from five different countries. Gone are the days when most of our fresh tomatoes came in uniform spheres from the greenhouses of Guernsey. In one of their best chapters, the authors describe how the "Guernsey tom" was killed off by Dutch competition. The old Guernsey tomato farms are now scenes of "rotting vineries and broken glass", and the island's economy has switched to banking.
There's not much to mourn about the tomatoes of Guernsey - they never tasted of much anyway. But it would be unbearable if the market ever forced tinned tomatoes to go the same way. I'm praying for good weather in Italy this summer.
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