For you tomato lovers out there, good luck this season. According to Dan Barber’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, tomatoes have been scarce this year, especially in the Northeast United States, and we’ve already seen price increases of 20%. So what’s the problem? Late blight—the same plant disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century—has struck once again. While this year the blight will not lead to widespread famine, we do have a lot to learn from the extensive spread of the disease in tomatoes this year.
What about this year has created a breeding ground for late blight? For one thing, this summer’s humidity and abundance of precipitation has done more than just make your hair frizzy. Late blight loves warm temperatures, high humidity, and lots of rain.
But weather is only part of this formula. Where our tomato plants come from also plays a large part. Experts say that there was a prevalence of late blight in industrial breeding facilities which distributed starter plants across the country via large chains such as Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart. Expediting the contamination process is an increased interest in gardening and growing locally. According to the National Gardening Association, 7 million more households have either planted small gardens in their homes or invested in a community garden. So instead of spreading through large farms, late blight has contaminated people’s backyards. This is the irony of the situation: the people who are conscious of the problems with the traditional food system and buy and grow food locally are actually causing a dreadful situation for tomato lovers and growers.
The problem, according to the article, is that people these days are not as educated about agriculture. An increased interest and conscientiousness exists, but experience does not, resulting in a lack of diversity in growing methods and crop variety.
Ultimately, Barber believes that food should not be grown just for yield, but for taste and heartiness as well. If we learned to grow tomatoes that were specific to the many climates in our country, he says, late blight might not have spread across all the different varieties.
For more information on late blight, click here.
