Aunt Ruby's Green Tomato

By Bill Landis

A professor of nutrition leaves his office and heads into the fields of a local farm to dig deeper into the reality of his food. With the help of several of his students, he films his experience chronicling the life of a tomato plant, from seed to harvest, on a small family farm. He is introduced to farm life at quirky Eco Farm by “Big John,” the rock star farmer. Over the course of one summer, he is schooled on the ways of organic agriculture, the sex life of the tomato, is introduced to the enigmatic world of heirloom tomatoes, and ponders the spiritual life of plants and the miracle of a seed. Told with humor and personal anecdotes from his food upbringing in New Jersey in the 1960s, he takes a fresh look at the changes in the American dietary landscape over the last half-century, and attempts to salvage a connection to his food.

Upon visiting a tomato seed company in western North Carolina, he learns of a unique heirloom tomato - Aunt Ruby’s German Green – a rare, green-when-ripe variety. He decides to track down the story behind “Aunt Ruby” and her backyard tomato treasure, hidden from the world for most of her life. What starts out as a straightforward plan to learn more about where his food comes from, takes him on a journey of self-discovery that leaves him questioning his core assumptions about nutrition and the very essence of food, finally finding clarity by way of an elderly woman from a little town in Tennessee and her unusual tomato.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823013833

Book preview

AUNT RUBY’S

GREEN TOMATO

Bill Landis

Samantha Reiff

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2023 Bill Landis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/07/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1382-6 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1381-9 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1383-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023916596

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For my

sister Stephanie

CONTENTS

Preface

The Perfect Vegetable

Our Marvelous Food System

Biscuits and Grits

Hamburger Soup

Turnip or Tomato?

Claire and Stephanie

Eco Farm

Life on a Small Organic Farm

Appalachian Seeds

Samantha Reiff

A Star Is Born

Where It All Began

Tomato 101

The Search for Aunt Ruby

Growing Aunt Ruby’s Green Tomato

Making Contact

Field of Dreams

Growth

Meeting Tomatoman

Channeling Ruby

Illness Strikes the Local Food Family

Future Farmers

Alternative Spring Break

Aunt Ruby’s Pink Tomato

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE

A recent retirement and move to the mountains of North Carolina has afforded me the luxuries of a house, a yard, and some time. Looking out upon my ⅛ acre from the window of Brownwood Cottage, as my wife and I have come to call our home, on a warmish February day, my thoughts turned to creating a garden. My first in nearly a decade, I savored the prospect of perusing seed catalogs for what would be its inaugural growing season. Excitement generated an unreasonably long list of candidate herbs and vegetables, then reason stepped it back to a plan a mere mortal could accomplish. On the shrinking list, one item stood firmly at the top: tomatoes. And in that category was one particular tomato: Aunt Ruby’s German Green.

I was introduced to this obscure heirloom in 2011 while visiting a small seed company for a film project I was working on, which became the impetus for this book. Circumstances have once again turned me to this manuscript and a fresh rereading. I set about making revisions with the goal of making it a leaner and better overall read. With this in mind, a few chapters were removed, along with a sentence and paragraph here and there, though I was mindful not to lose the spirit of discovery and honest emotions present in the original version. These revisions also served my intention to focus more fully on the story of my summer following an organic tomato plant, from seed to harvest, on a small family farm in central North Carolina, and the people I encountered along the way. Yet at the heart of the story is a woman and her heirloom tomato. In this new edition, it is my hope the reader can better appreciate the charming and poignant story of Ruby Arnold and the mystery behind her odd, very special, green-when-ripe tomato.

The passage of this much time since the first edition has brought many changes to the lives of the individuals who are found in these pages. The students have long since graduated and found their ways in life, working in the field of food and nutrition. At last check, the growers and experts consulted for this project are still growing food, conducting research, and producing tomato seeds. Sadly, some people have left us. With this new edition comes a chance to call into being their lives once more.

Bill Landis, January 2023

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THE PERFECT VEGETABLE

Most mornings during summer vacation as a child, I could be found sitting cross-legged on the floor of our den in front of the television, eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Straw-colored barrels of crunchy cereal fun floated in a sea of whole milk like cargo containers lost from the captain’s ship in rough seas.¹ I chased after each piece using my Tony the Tiger spoon with a level of competency honed over many years and a thousand bowls of breakfast cereal. With the cereal nearly gone, and Jonny, the star of the Jonny Quest action cartoon, about to wrap up another adventure in which he vanquished the monster or mad scientist du jour, my thoughts turned to finding my bathing suit and towel for a day at the beach. After I drained the remaining milk straight from the bowl, warm and sugar-sweetened, my search would begin.

I grew up twenty minutes from the shore in New Jersey, and it is here where I would fill the summer days of my youth. Being a member of a beach club, as we called them, was a nice setup for mothers and their children in the 1960s. In an era when fathers worked and mothers tended to their children (my parents had six), it was the ideal way to fill the long, hot summer days.

We would stake out our claim of sand for the day alongside the encampments of other families we knew, whereupon the mothers would chat, read, smoke, and catch up on sleep. They would periodically conduct head counts of their children playing in the moody surf of the Atlantic Ocean. The beach scene was for mothers and children Monday through Friday. Dads would appear, if at all, on weekends and holidays. My father came with us to the beach once each year, usually on the Fourth of July. He lived in a suit and tie during the workweek. On weekends, even in the middle of summer, he would wear long pants; the majority of his middle-aged Caucasian businessman flesh was exposed to direct sunlight on the same schedule as some popular comets visited the earth. Thus, it was always a little alarming at the annual public appearance of his strikingly pale body when he showed up at the beach club in the same bathing suit, straw hat, and sunglasses he owned when stationed in Hawaii after World War II. He would recline his long, thin body in a beach chair and lose himself in the rhythmic surge and withdrawal of the waves, blissfully unaware of his unique colorless appearance.

Provisioned with a thermos of Kool-Aid, bologna sandwiches, and bargain-brand cookies, my brother, sisters, and I would spend the day occupied in the wholesome activities of the seashore. Toward late afternoon, with our bodies mummified from a day’s exposure to salt, sun, and artificial preservatives, we would pack up our beach gear and head for home. Several days a week on the way home, my mother would stop at Mr. Marconi’s farm to buy fresh corn for dinner.

Mr. Marconi was the only farmer I knew personally growing up. This was not all that surprising given the fact that I grew up in one of the most densely populated sections of the country. Open spaces suitable for activities like farming were rapidly disappearing in the baby-booming 1960s. I should remind the reader that despite its reputation for planting things six feet under the ground in the middle of the night, New Jersey’s official nickname is The Garden State, and it probably richly deserved this appellation at some point in its history.

Mr. Marconi fit my image of a farmer, one I had formed early on from television programs and children’s books. I’d estimate his age to be around sixty years at the time I knew him. He was of average height, maybe a little less; on the stocky side; and, despite being unshaven, a bit weatherworn. He had a gap between his front teeth wide enough to insert a paperback book, but he nonetheless had a likable face and a big, welcoming smile. Mr. Marconi was outgoing and talkative and enjoyed spending time with his customers—his only chance to chat in a day filled with silent plants, I’m guessing. His attire was the standard uniform for farmers: overalls, plaid shirt, work boots, and ball cap. When change was owed to a customer, he would pull from his twelve pockets a wad of dollar bills and palm full of coins, slowly pick out the correct change, and hand it to his customer with a grateful smile.

At the time, I didn’t give Mr. Marconi a great deal of thought, but I remember being of the impression that he was poor, and a little hard up. I figured he had chosen the life of growing my food not because of any deliberate career planning on his part, that he had always wanted to be a farmer, or for other noble reasons. Rather, I felt he had gone into farming as a career of last resort. I assumed he was incapable or too poorly educated to qualify for more important and respected work like that of my father and my friend’s fathers: business, science, accounting, for example. To be honest, I felt a little sorry for him.

Even with my likely misestimate of Mr. Marconi’s career motives and socioeconomic status, he was all the same one of my favorite adults, because once a year in October he would let me, my brother and sisters, and every elementary school child in town run amok on his farm, searching for Halloween pumpkins. It was one of the unqualified highlights of my year. Christmas had a solid hold on first place on the list of important holidays for kids, but Halloween, which had both pumpkins and candy (nosing out Easter, with its candy and hard-boiled eggs), came in a highly respectable second. I’m not sure why I enjoyed going to Mr. Marconi’s farm to pick pumpkins so much. Some of it had to do with the fact that he didn’t harvest the pumpkins and pile them up at the farm stand for his customers to pick over, like you might find at the grocery store. Instead he left the pumpkins in the field, still attached to their woody umbilical cords, giving us kids unfettered access to his acre of orange crop. It took me no less than two hours of dedicated and euphoric searching to select the perfect Halloween pumpkin.

My affection for the pumpkin, a vegetable—one of my least favorite things in the world at the time—is explained easily enough. In our childhood world of limp, pallid vegetables, it was the hippest one out there. Name another vegetable that could grow as big as a medicine ball and weigh as much as my little sister. There are few. Try launching a zucchini or bundle of asparagus in a catapult and see what happens. I think you’ll be disappointed. In an age when the only electronics in our lives were four oscillating black-and-white channels on the television set, carving jack-o’-lanterns was terrific fun (still is). Its entertainment value didn’t stop there. When Halloween was over, pumpkins can be demolished in any number of exciting and violent ways. They can be smashed, blown to smithereens with fireworks, or riddled with BBs from a pellet gun. Finally, and most importantly, it was a vegetable I didn’t have to eat. It was the perfect vegetable.

Eventually my mother would tire of waiting by the car, and having exhausted her conversation for the day with Mr. Marconi, she would pay him a few dollars and then load us and our pumpkins into the car for the trip home. Our mode of transportation was three tons of station wagon from the early 1950s; with a few modifications, it could have been used as a landing craft on D-Day. With the rear seats folded down, a flat, slick surface was created, which allowed us to slide around like pucks on an air hockey table. Each turn of the car sent us and our pumpkins ricocheting about the rear of the car. As we slid about, I would try my best to ram one of my sisters into an inside wall of the car like a hockey player riding an opponent into the boards—a delightful final bonus to the whole affair.

Pumpkins really are one hell of a vegetable.

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OUR MARVELOUS

FOOD SYSTEM

As far as eating goes, I entered this world at an interesting time. I missed the gelatin-giddy 1950s, taking in my first breath and food in the spring of 1960, though I was fortunate to have experienced many of its leftovers. My decade, the 1960s, had plenty of its own interesting events and foods in store for me. An era known for its liberal approach to chemicals in our food and otherwise, it was poised to alter our gastronomic lives with an abundance of synthetic additives and high-tech formulations, which would enliven our diets with a dazzling array of colors, flavors, shapes, and preservative power heretofore unconsumed. We greeted every new technological advance offered by the food industry with open arms and mouths, and we saw each new, irresistible product as part of the natural evolution of food in the twentieth century. Food was advancing along with everything else in our lives. It was getting better. Cheese in cans the color of highway warning cones which shot out like shaving cream—amazing! Snack chips in the shape of little bugles—how fun! Breakfast cereals of every possible shape, color, and flavor—a kid’s dream! What more could you ask of your food?

Processed foods engineered with artificial colors and flavors were slowly stealing our taste buds, a deception to be honed to near perfection in the coming decades that would eventually redefine food for people in my generation and those that followed. There was locally produced food back then; we just didn’t know to think of it that way. If our corn on the cob came from Mr. Marconi’s farm, about as local as it could get, we called it Mr. Marconi’s corn, and we thought nothing more of it. No one uttered the phrase local corn. At the time, we didn’t think about our food in a critical way; we didn’t feel that any aspect of it needed investigation. We scarcely thought about it all. I can’t recall any concerns expressed by my parents over where our food came from, how it may have been treated if it happened to have legs or wings, who had picked it, or whether malevolent carcinogens might be lurking on or in it. My harshest criticisms of food came when the small plastic prize inside a box of breakfast cereal turned out to be a disappointing piece of junk or one of my siblings got to it first. For the most part, we were just enjoying what we had food wise, which was plentiful and accessible. We couldn’t have been more satisfied with our food supply.

It is by now a weary platitude to say that just about everything regarding our food has changed since I came on to the dining scene over sixty years ago, save for the need to chew and swallow. Food was simpler then, sure; it was also well on its way to becoming vastly more complicated. Our food system—the who, when, where, and how of our food—was leaving our daily lives and being relocated to places far away and out of sight. Still, we knew the milkman, the local butcher, and the farmer down the road, if only for a short time. With the better part of a lifetime in the books for me, these people and places from long ago have returned. I’ve been saving a place for them. I feel fortunate to have experienced eating in the middle of the twentieth century, when towering Jell-O molds were still the shimmering, jiggly centerpieces of backyard cookouts and a hot dog casserole was fare fit for the finest dinner company. And it is here that this local food story begins.

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The food supply for my family in the 1960s can be summed up nicely in one word: ShopRite. ShopRite was the name of the local supermarket chain where we lived and was by far the largest and most consistent supplier of food for my family. It was a grocery store like the kind you would have found anywhere in middle-class America in that era: large (small by today’s standards), with a wall of windows running across the front, to which were adhered large white posters with big red lettering advertising the current store bargains: canned peas—two for twenty-nine cents, fryers—twenty-nine cents per pound. Inside was filled wall to wall with towering shelves and display cases, stocked with a complete line of products—fresh, frozen, and packaged—the country’s food producers mustered for us. If I had to place a value on it, I’d say ShopRite supplied about 95 percent of our food over the course of a year. If ShopRite had been vaporized one day by a small meteor, we would have been in big trouble.

With ShopRite still standing and open for business, my mother would go there to do the weekly shopping for our family and purchase the food that made up our daily diet, which happened to parallel pretty closely the recommendations published by the government at the time in Food For Fitness: A Daily Food Guide (which offered guidelines popularly known as the Basic Four, better known as the basic four food groups).² The Basic Four was the first well publicized set of guidelines from the federal government (the US Department of Agriculture created them and still does) whose purpose was to provide the American populace with advice on creating a nutritionally complete and healthy diet. It turns out the Basic Four didn’t help make us all that healthy, but that is a whole other story. Whether our diets mirrored the Basic Four because of a conscious effort on my parents’ part to abide by government dietary policy or simply coincidence I’m not sure, but our diets were in lockstep with the Basic Four philosophy.

The Four in Basic Four referred to a classification scheme in which foods common in the American diet could be sorted and conceived to help guide the public on healthy menu planning. The food groups were the following: Meat, Dairy, Fruits and Vegetables, and Breads and Cereals. Simple fractions will inform you that this quartet was dominated by foods of animal origin, meat and dairy, and, if followed faithfully, would mean that one half of all servings of food one would consider eating each day would come from these two groups. The official word coming down from the federal government then was that fruits and vegetables should constitute a small part of our nutritional lives. Our feelings toward these wrongly persecuted foods in terms of official dietary policy couldn’t have been more evident, not to mention a clear signal on who holds sway in the business of food—the bucks lie with meat and milk. So the primary sources of healthy plant foods, fruits and vegetables, were given a token place in our diets and were forced to share a single, humiliating box in the Punnett square of suggested food groups, Fruits and Vegetables, a mere one-quarter officially, or one-eighth for each if considered separately, of what we should be consuming each day. A devout antivegetable eater at the time, I liked the Basic Four very much.

Despite their inferior status at the time, we knew deep down that plant foods had value in our lives even if we weren’t exactly sure why, and herein lay part of the problem in getting us children to eat more of them. The refrain from adults was that they were good for us, but exactly why was never convincingly conveyed. If, indeed, fruits and vegetables were as wonderful as our parents said, why was it that I didn’t see their dinner plates heaped full of them? We were told, Eat your vegetables, because they were good for us. Good in what way? Would they give us X-ray vision like Superman? Make us run faster? Make us the most popular kid in the third grade? I just couldn’t see it.

In contrast, there was no problem in convincing us to eat foods from the meat and dairy groups. Meat was the uncontested celebrity of our meals, especially at dinner, with beef the star of the show. Ground beef was a frequent visitor to our family menu during the week, and a better cut of beef was usually served on weekends, when my father was home. Ground beef was versatile and affordable, and the creative home cook had a plethora of recipes in which it could be deployed. Providing a strong, but clearly supporting, role was pork (pork chops, mostly), and making the occasional cameo appearance in our diets was chicken. Turkey appeared two times per year, in November and December. Let us not forget the icon of processed meats—Spam. Spam was an inexpensive, expirationless, canned backup meat source for the week before payday or when one simply had a hankering for a mottled, heterogeneous meat product coated in a pink gel. (I ate it often when young and enjoyed it. It was a mainstay of my mother’s diet then and can still be found in her kitchen cabinet to this day.) Despite our living a short drive from the Atlantic Ocean, fish, or any other type of seafood, seldom swam or slithered onto our plates. The impetus to choose fish over meat for its superior nutritional qualities was not recognized then and thus couldn’t sneak onto our menu even on that account. Breaded fish sticks were about as close as we got.

While it was true that the modern food system was rapidly gaining steam and altering the food landscape for the citizens of the United States, there remained a few family-owned purveyors of food and drink that we turned to on a fairly regular basis in our little town by the seashore. There was Mr. Marconi and his farm, as previously mentioned, but there was also a butcher shop, a pizza place, a liquor store the size of a clothes closet, and a candy store. Candy was the center of a child’s gastronomic world, and I would have happily sold any one of my five siblings into slavery for a single piece of it.

The candy store in town, Irv’s, on Broad Street, was located adjacent to the elementary school, the two buildings nearly gum-spitting distance from each other. It was a brilliant choice of location for the proprietor and a convenient one for us kids. Irv’s also sold a selection of sandwiches and pastries, big pickles in big jars, newspapers and magazines, and other high-volume sellers like nail clippers and black hair combs, though I never saw anyone in ten years buy any of these items; I never once saw an adult in the store, for that matter, except for Irv. Irv and his wife, who lived in a tiny apartment above the shop, would open early enough to catch the before-school crowd but saw their best patronage right after school, when their store would be packed with sugar-desperate kids after a long day of learning their times tables. After receiving my weekly allowance (ten cents per week), I would walk past the candy store and head straight to ShopRite to buy fresh carrots as a healthy after-school snack. That’s a big, fat fib, of course! I would buy as much candy as possible. Bazooka bubble gum was one cent a piece, and with a shiny new dime burning a hole in my corduroy pocket, I would buy ten pieces. At around fifteen calories each, they delivered almost nothing significant, nutritionally speaking, except for a few grams of wholesome sucrose. Nutrition was the last thing on my mind. I was after sugar—and something chewy after the sugar was gone.

Aside from Mr. Marconi’s farm, the butcher shop was the only other truly locally sourced food in town, and it played a pivotal role in my father’s diet and the future of mine. Located not far from Irv’s and the liquor