CAREER PATH'S TWISTS LEAD GENETICIST ON A QUEST TO PUT FLAVOR BACK IN THE FRUIT
L.A. Times | November 13, 1999 | TERRY MCDERMOTT
There are, according to this feature, perhaps a dozen professional tomato breeders in the United States and no more than twice that worldwide.
One - and we think only one - dreams of making yellow ketchup.
Kanti Rawal, a plant geneticist, came to California almost 20 years ago and soon thereafter embarked on a great, strange, tomato-breeding adventure that included forays into biotechnology, corporate takeovers and yellow ketchup. Rawal's still here. The ketchup isn't.
Here's his story.
It is the story of how at the end of the 20th century we have come to eat what we eat, including tomatoes that taste, as Rawal puts it, "like cardboard."
Beyond tomato particulars, it is also a story that reflects the transition of farming from sole proprietor to vast industrial undertaking - as well as a story of human progress, and its discontents.
It is, in other words, a story of California.
The obvious question you might ask of a man who would make yellow ketchup is why? The short answer is someone asked him to.
In 1981, Rawal gave up a tenured position on the University of Colorado faculty - he was beginning to "sink in its comfort," he says - and went to work for Del Monte, one of the country's oldest and largest food processing companies. At the time, Del Monte was going through a difficult period, falling behind competitors on a number of fronts. One specific concern was the company's failure to keep pace with competitors that had moved their tomato growing operations to California.
Del Monte originated in California, but most of its crops, and in particular its tomatoes, were grown in the Midwest. Tomatoes, up to the 1960s, were a seasonal crop eaten fresh or processed into ketchup. Cuisines that made extensive use of tomatoes - specifically Italian and Mexican foods - were little more than novelties in most American kitchens. When that changed, so did the demand for tomatoes.
To meet the surging demand, big tomato growers - Campbell's, H.J. Heinz and Hunt's - moved tomato operations west to California to take advantage of new harvesting and processing methods that cut costs sharply. Del Monte was caught unawares. The company had failed to recognize that California's Central Valley, after subsidized irrigation became broadly available in the 1960s, was the most efficient place on the planet to grow almost anything.
"It's the world's largest natural greenhouse," Rawal says. "The productivity of any crop that grows here is the most in the world."
Which is another way of saying it is by far the cheapest place to grow tomatoes.
Large food companies typically breed their own varieties of plants suited to the uses of their produce and the location of their planting.
The machines remove tomatoes from their vines by scooping the vine up off the ground and shaking it.
From the tomato's point of view, the effect isn't much different than being hit with a baseball bat. This tomato needs to be tough. It also needs to ripen at the same time as all its brother tomatoes on the vine, since the picking machine scrapes the entire plant out of the ground.
Del Monte hadn't developed new tomato lines to meet these
demands.
Rawal at the time was not a tomato specialist, per se. His doctoral work had been in wheat, with subsequent field work in African black-eyed peas. But he is a plant geneticist, and genetics is almost alone among the sciences in being governed by a single, powerful, overarching theory: evolution. You don't have to understand a specific species to understand the forces that control it. You need only understand the general rules governing natural selection.
If you need tomatoes, you go see Charley Rick.
More precisely, you go to UC Davis to the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center, the earth's largest repository of tomato seeds, named for its creator and genial overseer, the world's foremost authority on tomato varieties.
Davis is a quiet, flat, friendly place, ideal for bicycles and tractors.
It is one of a handful of locations around the globe where modern agriculture has been invented. As such, it is routinely praised and damned, often for the same accomplishments. Its scientists are lauded for boosting crop productivity and accused of creating food that, in the process of being re-engineered, has been denatured, robbed of taste.
Charley Rick came here as a young man at the tail end of the Great Depression. He was fresh out of Harvard and looking for a job. Any job, he says. He got one in what was then called the Department of Truck Crops. The chairman told him it might be interesting to look at tomatoes, paying particular attention to what are called bull tomatoes - mutant plants whose vines grow vigorously but produce no fruit. Rick dutifully took a trip through the tomato test plots.
What Rick found in the specific case of bull tomatoes was an indication of something much larger and long overlooked: the tomato's tremendous natural variation.
"By the end of that season, oh man, I had quite a collection of material. I just had two decades of work laid out for me. It was absolutely phenomenal."
The two decades eventually became almost six. The study of bull tomatoes led Rick to the door of the plant's genetic diversity. On the other side of that door lay a great wide world centered in the Andean highlands of Chile, Ecuador and Peru, where tomatoes originated. He became concerned that there was no consistent effort being made anywhere in the world to preserve this tremendous genetic legacy.
On the contrary, contemporary agricultural practice tended to reduce diversity, not enhance it. Farmers want predictability, not difference. Species were disappearing almost as he watched. Rick organized hunting expeditions to the Andes. By day, he would scour the countryside for new tomatoes. At night, in camp, he would extract the seed, preparing for transport back to Davis, where he eventually amassed the world's most diverse collection of tomato seed, which is to say the future of the tomato on earth.
In a superheated world where youngsters are told they will change jobs about as often as they change oil in their cars, Rick has stayed put, building and tending this great bank of genetic possibilities. He's a lanky man who wears running shoes and leaves his bush hat on indoors. Today, long after retirement, he comes to the university every day and does pretty much the same things he's been doing for the last 60 years.
Rick's legacy, the Tomato Genetics Resource Center, is housed in a plain concrete building called the Annex. Inside is a small room with a smaller 42-degree closet that is the vault in which the seeds of more than 4,000 varieties of tomatoes are kept. They are stored in plain envelopes, sorted chronologically into drawers. Several species stored here have gone extinct in the wild.
They'd be gone for good if Rick hadn't brought them back home to this closet.
The story says that Kanti Rawal talked to Rick about developing new tomato lines that would stand up to the rigors of modern harvesting and processing equipment. Rick steered him toward likely tomato types, and over the course of the next two years Rawal crossbred tomatoes until he came up with plants that did exactly what Del Monte wanted.
By 1985, Rawal's new tomatoes helped Del Monte establish itself in the stewed tomato and sauce businesses, but the company's ketchup was tanking. The advent of home tomato sauces had cut sharply into ketchup consumption and Heinz was routing all competition in the market that was left.
At about this time, Del Monte was taken over by the hastily arranged conglomerate that would become RJR Nabisco. Rawal was placed on a corporation-wide new product committee and it was there, on a conference call, that the question of what to do about ketchup was raised.
Del Monte's market research people had turned up an avenue of attack. The researchers had determined that young people, especially teenagers, dislike sharp, pungent foods. Mustard, for example; they hate mustard. That was OK with Del Monte since it wasn't big in the mustard business, anyway. The researchers also said that one thing young eaters did like was brightly colored food.
If Del Monte had something sweet and bright, it could sell that.
Rawal thought about that for a while.
How about this, he proposed: We could make a yellow ketchup and attack Heinz on two fronts: We could invade their ketchup business on one hand and cut their market share in mustard on the other.
The marketing people were thrilled, but they wondered: How do we make ketchup yellow?
It's simple, Rawal said. You make it out of something yellow, bananas, for example. Banana ketchup? Well, yes. Rawal had previously helped a Del Monte Philippine subsidiary develop a yellow condiment out of ripe bananas that were otherwise being thrown away. Ketchup is a combination of vinegar, sugar, spices and some solid. There are ancient recipes that use almost anything but tomatoes - walnuts, mushrooms, gooseberries, even anchovies - as the solid ingredient.
What Rawal didn't know but soon found out was that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was not a big fan of ancient recipes. If something was going to be called ketchup, it had to be made from tomatoes.
Well, he said, let's make it with yellow tomatoes then.
This is the kind of idea that often emerges when people are encouraged to think outside the box (or bottle, as it happened). Never mind that this was probably silly on the face of it. It sounded good at the time. It was new. It was great. And, most important, Heinz didn't have it.
Rawal was told to go for it.
"The first thing I did was call Charley Rick again. I said, 'I'm looking for a yellow tomato I can use for processing, to make ketchup.' He laughed and asked me what I was smoking."
Rick told Rawal that yellow tomato mutants were fairly common.
About one in 100,000 naturally occurring mutations is yellow. And there were in fact, yellow tomato seeds sold commercially to home gardeners. But a backyard tomato would never hold up to the rigors of the ketchup business. The new tomato had to be a firm variety. All the tomatoes on the plant would have to mature at the same time.
And they had to have the correct balance of sugars and acids. What Rawal needed were the exact qualities red processing tomatoes had, only in yellow.
Rawal, if he had chosen, could have attempted to make the yellow tomato in a laboratory. Color is determined by a single gene on Chromosome 6 of the tomato's DNA. Rawal could have attempted to splice the yellow gene into one of the red tomatoes he had previously developed. But he is not a big fan of biotechnical solutions, which he thinks are susceptible to public disapproval and more difficult to achieve in any event.
He quotes an old Indian proverb: Why try to eat the honey with your elbow if you have a spoon.
The spoon in this case was simple, classic Mendelian genetics. He set up a breeding program starting with yellow mutant seed from Rick's gene bank and standard red processing tomatoes.
Crossbreeding tomatoes is extraordinarily simple. You grow the two varieties you want to cross, then physically rub the pollen from one onto the stigma of the other. In a month or so, you'll have a live hybrid in your hand.
The difficulty is in knowing what that hybrid will be - which characteristics of each parent it will have. Even more difficult is getting the desired characteristics into the succeeding generations. It's a fairly laborious, time-consuming process. There is simply no way to make the plant grow any faster than it wants.
Rawal was able to use Del Monte's resources around the world to give him a virtually endless growing season. He started the hybrids in the company greenhouses in San Leandro, in the San Francisco Bay Area, then followed the sun to Guadalajara, Mexico; the Central Valley; the Philippines; the Imperial Valley; and Stockton. The effect was to squeeze six breeding seasons into a single calendar year.
In eighteen months, by the summer of 1986, he had the tomato he wanted - a yellow Roma - and enough seed to plant a 100-acre test plot near Modesto.
"It was quite a sight, all the golden and yellow fruit," he says.
Del Monte processed the tomatoes into paste that fall - a gorgeous golden paste that would make a gorgeous golden ketchup. Rawal had a label designed, a bright, sunshiny label, with yellow edging into orange. All he needed now was the money to produce enough seed for a real crop the next year.
He never got it. That era of junk-bond-built companies like RJR Nabisco was coming to an end and the pieces were coming apart, dealt off as quickly as they were assembled. The Del Monte pineapple business went to the Japanese. A Mexican drug king bought the fresh produce business. The new products committee was disbanded. Within six months, Rawal left the company, packing his expertise off to a new subsidiary of a French cement company that decided it wanted to get into biotech.
That didn't last either.
So he started a small company called California Hybrids. He was the sole employee. He began another breeding program, this time aimed at something even harder to achieve than yellow ketchup. He wanted to breed tomatoes that taste good.
It's more than a decade since the cement boys gave him his walking papers. Rawal has been working with tomatoes, mostly yellow tomatoes, ever since. He has spent the time in places like this, a small test plot in a field outside Gilroy.
He's accompanied in the tomato plot - chased, would be closer to it - by Yiran Yu, a geneticist who has made the jump from the science of plants to the science of money. Yu's become an entrepreneur and is interested in buying some of Rawal's seeds. The Chinese market beckons. Dr. Yu hasn't much time. Dr. Rawal has many tomatoes.
One more variety he wants Yu to see, to touch, to taste. At one point, Yu sighs and says: "If you're in a hurry, never go out with a tomato breeder."
"How can they have no taste at all?" he says.
With the tomato as with many things, the qualities - taste and flavor - that made the thing what it was were lost in the process of improving it. An oft-cited Department of Agriculture consumer survey shows more dissatisfaction with tomatoes than any other food item.
What happened?
There is broad agreement that the answer lies not so much in the tomatoes themselves as in what is done to them. In 1975, researchers at UC Davis demonstrated that spraying green tomatoes with an organic gas, ethylene, makes them turn red. Such tomatoes could then be picked while they were still green (and thus firm enough to withstand the rigors of transport), stored, then gassed red just before delivery to markets.
That is now the predominant means of handling tomatoes. Most tomato scientists think the tomatoes have the same inherent flavor, but it never develops because the fruit is picked before maturity, before crucial flavor chemicals can act.
"Ripening is a sunshine-induced process," Rawal says. "Gassing won't do it. We end up with a green tomato that looks red. I call them painted tomatoes. Painted with gas."
Rawal experimented with more than 250 tomato varieties, looking for one that could withstand contemporary practices and recapture the lost flavor.
In the end, he was faced not so much with finding flavor as choosing among many different ones. Almost all of the tomatoes in his plot taste better than any store-bought tomato you've eaten in 20 years. As eager and proud as he is about what he is growing, he is suspect of the food industry's ability to capitalize on it. He has 29 different kinds of tomatoes in this one little plot. A normal supermarket might stock two - red Romas and red beefsteak. They're bought on price, merely as commodities.
Rawal decided the only way to get his tomatoes to market was to do it himself.
Farmers, who at the drop of a John Deere cap will tell you how much they prize their freedom, are governed by more rigid laws than anyone on earth. Nature knows nothing about clemency or parole.
Farmers battle mainly by imposing regimes on the balky land. They call these regimes farms, but out here in the Central Valley they're very much closer to factories.
To look at this land as it must have looked a century ago and see a great fertile basin would have been lunatic, like landing on the Sea of Tranquillity and saying, "Yes, the sofa goes here."
The valley is gridded into fields like crossword squares and pancake flat. The dirt-hugging towns are built of cinder block so low to the ground they look like they're trying to duck the sun, which pours down here in the same way the rain might somewhere else. It has volume and texture and makes your head hurt.
Yet California's great Central Valley, virtually a desert, has been transformed into an assembly line of food. It is 430 miles long and 75 miles wide and generates more than a quarter of the country's produce. California's agricultural output has quintupled in 30 years, doubled just since Rawal started working with tomatoes. It dwarfs that of old Bread Basket states.
Before farming, almost all humans were engaged in the production of food. Now, in an advanced industrial society, almost no one is. In California, the biggest farm state in the biggest farm country, farmers and ranchers comprise less than 1% of the state's 33 million people.
The sheer volume and variety they produce are incredible: 90% of the nation's broccoli, Brussels sprouts, celery and nectarines; all of its artichokes, almonds, olives and prunes. There are melons, garlic, lemons, limes and nectarines; onions, bok choy, sweet corn, red peppers, green peppers and alfalfa hay.
"I'm trying to think of what they can't grow here," says John Guido, who has been put in charge of growing Kanti Rawal's tomatoes.
