You Say Heirloom, I Say Tomato

Saucer – What makes a tomato an heirloom? – Old School

Rather than an heirloom tomato being a general type of tomato, like a plum, or a specific cultivar like a San Marzano - heirlooms come from a plant that is ‘open-pollinated’. Bees, bugs, birds, wind, garden beetles and possibly gardening Beatles have to pollinate the plant in order for it to bear fruit.

Tomato growers agree open-pollination is a prerequisite for heirloom status; which is funny, because the very nature of open-pollinating means that the plant will change, however slightly from generation to generation, so today’s plant is different from the one being grown 40, 60 or 100 years ago. As you'd imagine with a word like heirloom, the issue of age matters a great deal.

Some feel the plants need a provenance of 100 years. Others think the tomato should have been around before World War II and a smaller faction advocates that to be considered a heirloom variety, the cultivar needed to be in existence before 1970. A 100, though a nice round number, seems a bit arbitrary. The 1970s seem like as good of date as any; early pioneers of the ‘organics’ movement were experimenting with different crops but if you have to have a cutoff date, 1945 makes the most sense. The post war environment brought about the advent of industrial tomato pickers, the burgeoning use of chemical fertilizers and the adoption of hybrid seeds by commercial growers, each moved tomato growing towards the picked-green & tasteless-thick-skinned-early harvested monoculture that defines tomatoes to this day.

I’m not sure age should ever be used as a criteria in judging anything and if you have a problem with that sentiment - use your circa 1997 cell phone to text me your opinion. The USDA has not weighed in on the subject, so there is no legal definition for the heirloom tomato. Tomato enthusiasts regularly trade seeds and information but it is done informally without a private organization, like a tomato version of the American Kennel Club to set standards for breeds/cultivars. However, tomato experts Carolyn Male and Craig Le Houllier have come the closest to setting universal standards by identifying 4 different types of heirlooms:

1. The Commercial Heirloom – Varieties introduced to the marketplace prior to 1940.
2. Family Heirloom – Seeds that have been passed down through family, friends and like minded enthusiasts for generations.
3. Created Heirloom – Like the green zebra, a tomato that has been bred for specific traits, then the plant is ‘de-hybridized’ to become an open pollinated plant.
4. The Mystery Heirloom – A volunteer or a spontaneous breeding that is the product of natural pollination.
   

Tomatoes might be the best known heirloom food but there are others. The notion of open-pollination, not age, conflicts with the concept of heirloom potatoes – potatoes are cloned from ‘eyes’ rather than grown from a seed that needs to be pollinated. As for heirloom chickens, I don’t remember my avian biology that well, but I am pretty sure chickens don’t pollinate – not even euphemistically. Growers seem to be using the term heirloom to market their foods, capitalizing on heirloom as a culinary buzzword, rather than a definitive term. Perhaps the British gardening term heritage would be a better term for chickens, potatoes, carrots, lettuce or non-tomatoey foods, otherwise the word heirloom runs the risk of being a synonym for expensive.