A few weeks ago, I was having dinner at a renowned restaurant in San Francisco, when I noticed something a bit troubling on the menu. According to the description, the "Heirloom Tomato Salad" was made with a mix of Sweet 100 and Sungold tomatoes -- both of which are hybrid varieties.
OK, big deal, they made a mistake. Well, two weeks later, I stopped at a farm stand advertising heirloom tomatoes, and sure enough, the alleged heirlooms were hybrids.
All this falsity in advertising has me wondering if the term "heirloom" is becoming just another one of those previously meaningful adjectives now relegated to the greenwashed ranks of "natural," "local," and "family-farm." As someone who co-manages a farm, where we grow a number of heirloom varieties, I certainly hope it isn't.
Heirloom vegetable varieties are open-pollinated, which means that if you save the seed, the next generation will breed "true" (assuming no accidental cross pollination). Additionally, heirlooms are from seed lines usually 50 years-old or older. Granted, this stipulation about age is a somewhat vague marker. Since the term "heirloom" hasn't been standardized in the same way that the federal organic label has, it's open to some creative interpretation. Green Zebra tomatoes, for example -- often called heirlooms -- are open-pollinated, although they were first bred about 25 years ago.
One thing is for sure: heirlooms are not hybrids, which are newer varieties bred for increased production and vigor. Unlike our Brandywine and Garden Peach tomatoes, seeds from hybrid tomatoes will not produce the same fruit from which they were saved.
Furthermore, heirlooms are often more difficult to grow than hybrids. They don't grow as vigorously or produce as abundantly. In addition to having incredible flavor, it's important to me and the people with whom I farm to keep these seed lines alive as a matter of principle. Growing heirlooms maintains diversity within the rapidly dwindling gene pool of agricultural crops, and selling them to our delighted CSA members cultivates a demand for them. And although we're not yet expert seed savers, open-pollinated varieties keep us from being reliant on the seed company every year. Take that, Monsanto.
So, ye tomato marketers, no more cheating. Let's call an heirloom an heirloom.
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Comments
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sindark Posted 2:36 am
01 Oct 2008
That is not to say that all hybrids can be legitimately called heirlooms - just that the two categories aren't mutually exclusive.
a sibilant intake of breath
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:57 am
01 Oct 2008
From the Brooklyn Botanical Garden website:
On F1 hybrids (like Sweet 100s and Sungolds):
The term "F1 hybrid" means the first filial generation made by crossing two different parent varieties, the offspring of which produce a new, uniform seed variety with specific characteristics from both parents. For example, breeders may choose to cross two tomato varieties to make an F1 hybrid that exhibits the early maturity of one parent and a specific disease resistance of the other. The unique characteristics of an F1 hybrid are very uniform only in the first generation of seed, so seed saved from F1 plants will not come true if replanted and may exhibit many distinct types in the second generation, often reverting to various ancestral forms.
On open-pollinated seeds (like green zebras):
Open-pollinated seeds are a result of either natural or human selection for specific traits which are then reselected in every crop. The seed is kept true to type through selection and isolation; the flowers of open-pollinated or O.P. seed varieties are pollinated by bees or wind. Their traits are relatively fixed within a range of variability. For example, if I grew the 'Brandywine' variety of open-pollinated tomato in dry northern California summers year after year and saved seeds only from the best-tasting, earliest- ripening fruits in my climate zone, I would have a locally adapted strain of 'Brandywine', different from the 'Brandywine' grown by a gardener in humid, rainy Alabama who has been saving seeds from fruits that produce very well in his or her climate, rather than my California conditions.
Finally, on heirlooms, a subset of open-pollinated varieties:
All heirloom varieties are open-pollinated, but not all open-pollinated varieties can be considered heirlooms. Unfortunately, the definition of "heirloom" has been somewhat of a moving target recently, but generally it means a variety that is at least 40 to 50 years old, that is no longer available in the commercial seed trade, and that has been preserved and kept true in a particular region. So, for example, if a variety of open-pollinated pepper has been grown in Vermont or Maine for five or six generations and seed has been selected and saved by local growers and gardeners, it would be considered an heirloom variety. Obviously, heirloom varieties have been saved because they have some real virtues. The classic examples are heirloom tomatoes, which often have superior flavor, color, or texture, but lack the holding ability, disease resistance, early maturity, or other characteristics that would make them commercially viable.
Victual Reality
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sindark Posted 4:58 am
01 Oct 2008
F1 hybrids are the products of selective breeding and produce offspring that are not optimized like they are. It seems that these have been used by farmers since about the 1930s.
More generally, a 'hybrid' is either the result of 'interbreeding between two animals or plants of different taxa' or 'crosses between populations, breeds or cultivars within a single species.' Indeed, it would be hard to carry out agriculture without producing hybrids of this kind.
Given that heirloom vegetables were produced at some point by selective breeding between between populations, breeds or cultivars within a single species, it seems that they are hybrids in the second sense of the term.
a sibilant intake of breath
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