Tomato Season Is Different This Year

The Atlantic

4 days ago

Every summer, there is a brief window—call it August—when the produce is exquisite. The cherries are at their best, as are the peaches, plums, and nectarines. The watermelon is sweet. The eggplants are glossy. The corn is pristine. And the tomatoes! The tomatoes are unparalleled. There's a reason tomatoes are synonymous with summer, staple of home gardens and farmers' markets alike. Giant, honking beefsteaks and sprightly Sungolds are begging to be transformed into salads and gazpachos, tossed with pasta and sliced into sandwiches, or eaten raw by the fistful. Enjoy them while you can.
Come fall, tomato season will be over just as quickly as it began. Yes, you can obtain sliceable red orbs in virtually any supermarket, at any time of year, anywhere in the United States. But they are pale imitations of dripping August heirlooms. Out-of-season tomatoes—notoriously pale, mealy, and bland—tend to be tomatoes in name only. They can be serviceable, dutifully filling out a Greek salad; they can valiantly garnish a taco and add heft to a grilled-cheese sandwich. At the very least, they contribute general wetness and a sense of virtue to a meal. Flavor? Not so much.
This year, of all years, it's worth indulging in the bounties of high tomato season. The bloodless tomatoes waiting for us in the fall are mostly imported from Mexico, and as with so many other goods these days, they are now stuck in the middle of President Donald Trump's trade war. This week, the White House imposed 17 percent tariffs on Mexican tomatoes. In all likelihood, that will mean higher prices for grocery-store tomatoes, Tim Richards, an agricultural economist at Arizona State University, told me. This will not make them better in terms of color, texture, or flavor—but it will make them cost more.
Grumbling about grim winter tomatoes is a long-standing national hobby, and at the same time, their existence is a small miracle. You can eat a BLT in the snow or a Caprese salad for Valentine's Day with no effort at all. In August 1943, before Americans could get fresh tomatoes year-round, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia encouraged housewives to brace for winter by canning as many tomatoes as they could. 'They are in your city's markets and I want to see every woman can them while they are at this low price,' he announced. They wouldn't have to do it for long. By the 1960s, 'just about every supermarket and corner store in America was selling Florida tomatoes from October to June,' the author William Alexander wrote in Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World. They were visually perfect but tasted like Styrofoam, which is in many ways what they were supposed to be: durable, pest-resistant, long-lasting, and cheap. Tomatoes are famously fragile and quick to rot, so they are often picked while still green, and then gassed with ethylene. It turns them red, giving the appearance of ripeness but not the corresponding flavor. In recent years, the situation has somewhat improved: Instead of focusing exclusively on looks and durability, horticulturalists have turned their attention to maximizing flavor.
There is another reason year-round tomatoes have improved: Mexico. 'Most of the nice-looking, really tasty tomatoes in the market are Mexican,' Richards said. That includes small varieties such as cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, and cocktail tomatoes, or, as he classified them, 'those little snacking tomatoes in the plastic things.' Mexico manages to produce this steady stream of year-round, pretty-good tomatoes by growing them primarily in greenhouses, which Richards said is the best possible way to produce North American tomatoes at scale. Even in winter, tomatoes sheltered from the elements can be left to ripen on the vine, which helps improve the taste.
All of which is to say that an America without easy access to imported Mexican tomatoes looks bleak. Like all of Trump's tariffs, the point of taxing Mexican tomatoes is to help producers here in the U.S. Thirty years ago, 80 percent of the country's fresh tomatoes were grown in America. Now the share is more like 30 percent, and sliding. America could produce enough tomatoes to stock grocery stores year-round—Florida still grows a lot of them—but doing that just doesn't make a lot of sense. 'It's not cost-effective,' Luis Ribera, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University, told me. 'We cannot supply year-round tomatoes at the prices that we have.' Unlike Mexico, Florida mainly grows its tomatoes outside, despite the fact that it is ill-suited to outdoor tomato growing in pretty much all ways: The soil is inhospitable. The humidity is an incubator for disease. There are regular hurricanes. 'From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective,' the food journalist Barry Estabrook wrote in Tomatoland, 'you would have to be an idiot to attempt to commercially grow tomatoes in a place like Florida.'
Exactly what the tariffs will mean for grocery prices is hard to say. Tomatoes will be taxed when they cross the border, so importers and distributors will directly pay the costs. But eventually, the increase will likely trickle down to the supermarket. The story of tariffs, Ribera said, is that 'the lion's share is paid by consumers.' In the short term, Richards estimated that price hikes will depend a lot on the variety of tomato, with romas hardest hit. 'That's the one we rely on most from Mexico,' he said. Beefsteaks, he added, will face a smaller increase.
Compared with some of the other drastic tariffs that Trump imposed, a 17 percent price bump on Mexican tomatoes hardly portends the tomato-pocalypse. Last year, the average import price of Mexican tomatoes was about 74 cents a pound. If the entire 17 percent increase is passed on to consumers, we'd be looking at an additional 13 cents—enough to notice, but not enough for a critical mass of people to forgo romas altogether. Here's the other thing: People want tomatoes, and they want them now. 'We don't want to wait for things to be in season,' Ribera said, and we aren't about to start.
For all of the many problems with out-of-season tomatoes, Americans keep eating them. It was true when winter tomatoes were a novelty: 'I don't know why housewives feel they have to have tomatoes,' one baffled supplier told The New York Times in 1954. But they did, and people still do. Season to season, our national tomato consumption fluctuates relatively little, the grocery-industry analyst Phil Lempert told me. Every burger joint in America needs tomatoes—not the best tomatoes, but tomatoes that exist. There is a whole genre of recipes about how to make the most of out-of-season tomatoes. A lesser tomato, of course, is better than no tomato at all.