Appearance of tomatoes is important to the Florida Tomato Committee

To the Florida Tomato Committee Appearance is what Matters

If you find a tomato that has a “cat face,” you’re in luck.

When a tomato has an odd shape, deep ridges, different shades of colors or other irregularities, tomato farmers call it a cat face.

No doubt you’ve seen a cat face at some point. If you grow tomatoes in a home garden, probably most of your tomatoes would be considered cat faced. And in spite of their appearance, cat faced tomatoes are usually very flavorful.

But to the Florida Tomato Committee (FTC) appearance is what matters.

No tomato can be shipped from Florida unless it measures up the FTC criteria of what a tomato should look like: red, nearly round, uncreased and unblemished. The fact that such tomatoes are mostly tasteless is irrelevant. Good nutrition? Not a criteria. It’s all about looks and durability (for shipping purposes).

This FTC status quo is currently being challenged by the growers of one variety of vine-ripened tomato called UglyRipes. And as the name implies, these tomatoes have a face that only a mother cat could love. But even though UglyRipes are more flavorful than their perfectly attractive cousins, the FTC has banned them from shipment outside of Florida because they’re not up to snuff in appearance.

According to the New York Times, the FTC has stated that the UglyRipe tomato doesn’t meet the necessary standards that “ensure customer satisfaction and improve grower returns.”

Want to decode that sentence? In place of “customer satisfaction,” just insert “ease of shipping and less spoilage.” What customer in his right mind is satisfied with a hard, tasteless tomato? The way I see it, FTC rules seem to be all about commerce, not customers.

But UglyRipes may still have a chance to ship nationwide. Officials of the company that grows URs have requested an exemption for their product, claiming that their tomato is an “heirloom” variety, completely unlike the typical commercial tomato. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is scrutinizing UglyRipe to determine if its genetic lineage will exempt it from the FTC restrictions.

So if you’re browsing your grocer’s fruit stalls and come across a tomato that looks like it might let out a “meow,” you can be pretty sure that its heritage is one of flavor and not simply business as usual.

Sources:
“Forget About Taste, Florida Says, These Tomatoes Are Just Too Ugly to Ship” Florence Fabricant, The New York Times, 12/21/04, nytimes.com