Chopped in salads, scooped up in salsa, slathered on pizza and
pasta, squeezed onto burgers and fries, and filling aisles with
roma, cherry, beefsteak, on-the-vine, and heirloom: where would
American food, fast and slow, high and low, be without the tomato?
The tomato is representative of the best and worst of American
cuisine: though the plastic-looking corporate tomato is the
hallmark of industrial agriculture, the tomato's history also
encompasses farmers' markets and home gardens. Garden Variety
illuminates American culinary culture from 1800 to the present,
challenging a simple story of mass-produced homogeneity and
demonstrating the persistence of diverse food cultures throughout
modern America. John Hoenig explores the path by which, over the
last two centuries, the tomato went from a rare seasonal crop to
America's favorite vegetable. He pays particular attention to the
noncorporate tomato. During the twentieth century, as food
production, processing, and distribution became increasingly
centralized, the tomato remained the king of the vegetable garden
and, in recent years, has become the centerpiece of alternative
food cultures. Reading seed catalogs, menus, and cookbooks, and
following the efforts of cooks and housewives to find new ways to
prepare and preserve tomatoes, Hoenig challenges the extent to
which branding, advertising, and marketing dominated
twentieth-century American life. He emphasizes the importance of
tomatoes to numerous immigrant groups and their influence on the
development of American food cultures. Garden Variety highlights
the limits on corporations' ability to shape what we eat, inviting
us to rethink the history of our foodways and to take on our
opportunity to expand the palate of American cuisine.
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