Dan Barber says agricultural disaster. I say expensive BLTs.
In a recent NYTimes article Dan Barber, the head chef of Blue Hill at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York, wrote an interesting op-ed on some of the hidden costs in the latest movement to plant your own gardens and support heirloom vegetable varieties. The article (You say tomato, I say agricultural disaster) talks about the late blight that has been sweeping through the northeast and killing off huge parts of the tomato and potato crops. Though always somewhat present, the blight this year, in response to the wet, humid and moderate summer we’ve been having, has been particularly pernicious. This weather, coupled with the fact that more and more people are planting their own backyard gardens, has allowed the blight to spread quickly through the northeast. In particular, tomato starter plants bought at large stores like Home Depot, where the plants are farmed in huge numbers and transported long distances, are particularly susceptible and in many cases already contain the blight when they are purchased.
One of the most interesting parts of the article in my mind was Dan Barber’s account of how our perceptions of heirloom varieties play a role in the spread of the blight. “To many advocates of sustainability, science, when it’s applied to agriculture, is considered suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic. It’s a nostalgia I’m guilty of promoting as a chef when I celebrate only heirloom tomatoes on my menus”. Many people, myself included, have come to think of heirloom tomatoes as the perfect Tomato — celebrating both the cultural history of the fruit and also its taste. But Barber is right to point out that while I am busy planting my own heirloom tomato garden and shunning new breeding programs I am taking away some of the fruit’s protection. Breeding can many times help to save agriculture by creating disease-resistant crops. At the Stone Barns farm, for example, the Mountain Magic tomato, bred for resistance, has shown no signs of the late blight, whereas 70% of the heirloom varieties have.
In the end all of this means we can expect higher prices on tomatoes at the farmers market, especially in the northeast. But Barber also has a few tips for those planting their own gardens to protect future tomato crops: if you plan to plant your own garden, buy from local nurseries that regularly check their stores for blight and remove infected plants. Also support the government in creating a cooperative extension program that sends trained individuals into the field to check crop health and share best practices with growers. Hopefully we can take a lesson this year’s expensive BLTs and put a better system in place for future crops.
