Tremors in the Hothouse: Genetically Altered Tomatoes

From The New Yorker
July 19, 1993

In most parts of the world, people do not eat fresh tomatoes out of season. The supermarket tomato is a peculiarly American idea. Americans expect to have fresh vegetables in the supermarket all year long, regardless of season, and plant breeders have done what they can to accommodate them. Corn and peas have been bred to convert sugar into starch more slowly, lettuce to retain water longer, and potatoes to resist rot. The pepper, a cousin of the tomato, has been very satisfactorily adapted to supermarket culture–tricked out in a palette of designer colors and endowed with a shelf life of more than a month. But the tomato has refused to go along with the program. Plant breeders have created attractive tomato-like objects that are durable enough to be transported long distances without turning into paste, but while these inventions are useful to tomato producers (they reduce “the shrink,” which is the number of tomatoes lost in transit), they don’t taste like tomatoes, a significant disadvantage to the consumer. The fresh tomato, endowed with every advantage on the vine, spectacularly fails to achieve its potential in the supermarket. The flesh is cottony and insipid, and the gel–the gluey liquid in which the seeds are suspended, and which is the source of most of the tomato’s flavor–sometimes falls out when you slice the tomato, leaving a cavity surrounded by a tough tomato hide.

In spite of widespread unhappiness with the supermarket tomato–in a recent Department of Agriculture study, consumers rated the tomato thirty-first out of thirty-one produce items in order of satisfaction–the average American buys eighteen pounds of tomatoes a year, more than any other item of produce except lettuce and potatoes. The fresh-tomato market in the United States is four billion dollars, which is about the size of the whole biotechnology industry. How much more consumers might spend on a tomato that actually tastes like a tomato is a question that has long tantalized people in the business world. Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Gulf & Western, invested in the tomato business in the nineteen-sixties, and in the late seventies Jack Dorrance, the majority owner of Campbell Soup, made the development of a good supermarket tomato a personal crusade. The tomato got the better of these men. In recent years, Holland tomatoes, Israeli tomatoes, Sicilian cherry tomatoes, French hothouse tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes, and hydroponic tomatoes have turned up in produce aisles around the country, and, while many of these varieties taste better than run-of-the-mill supermarket tomatoes, none have what people in the tomato business call “that back-yard flavor.” Cherry tomatoes occasionally do have the back-yard flavor, but there isn’t much of a market for cherries in the United States. According to market research, Americans like their tomatoes big and fat.

This fall, around the time frost kills the last tomato plants growing in back yards around Chicago, and the taste of summer begins to fade from the palates of tomato-lovers everywhere, a new, genetically engineered tomato will appear in Midwestern supermarkets. The name of the tomato is the Flavr Savr. It will be the first food created by the use of recombinant DNA ever to go on sale. Executives at Calgene, a small California biotechnology company that invented the Flavr Savr, are confident that theirs is the tomato others have sought for so long. “Our technology has allowed us to integrate the back-yard flavor back into the tomato,” says Stephen Benoit, a vice-president of Calgene Fresh, a subsidiary of Calgene. Roger Salquist, the chief executive officer of Calgene, says, in a characteristic burst of optimism, “We’re going to sell a hell of a lot of tomatoes, and the growers, the sellers, our shareholders–everybody is going to get rich.”

That Calgene has been able to raise two hundred and ten million dollars over the last decade, a period in which the company has only once made a profit (last year, Calgene lost twenty million dollars), is a fair measure of how good Salquist is at inspiring investors. On Wall Street, anticipation of the tomato’s arrival is keen. “The tomato is very important, because it’s the first genetically altered food to hit the market,” says George Dahlman, a financial analyst with the investment firm Piper Jaffray. “If the tomato succeeds, it’s going to be a big lift to all the other genetically altered foods coming along in the pipeline.” This spring, a rumor that the Flavr Savr might not be the tomato Calgene has been saying it is–“I heard yesterday that Calgene’s tomato doesn’t work,” one investor said to me at an investment conference in March–caused alarm throughout the biotech industry. Around the same time, Tom Churchwell, the president of Calgene Fresh, seemed to back away from some of Roger Salquist’s promotional claims. “We don’t have all the back-yard flavor–yet,” he told me. “We will. Eventually, we’re going to design acidic tomatoes for the New Jersey palate and sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate.” Salquist, however, continued to claim, “We have the back-yard flavor.”

The Flavr Savr is not without competitors. DNA Plant Technology, of Cinnaminson, New Jersey, is experimenting with a gene it has manufactured which is based on an anti-freeze gene from an Arctic flounder, in the hope of producing a tomato that can be chilled without being damaged. Other genetically engineered foods in the pipeline include a potato with a chicken gene, a potato with a wax-moth gene, and tobacco with a firefly gene (the plants glow in the dark), which have all been cleared by the Department of Agriculture for field-testing. Two of the country’s largest breeders of chickens have done research to develop birds that will grow faster with less feed, and Auburn University, in Alabama, with a similar aim, has spliced a trout gene into a carp. A few years ago, in an effort to produce leaner pork, researchers at the Department of Agriculture’s main research center, in Beltsville, Maryland, spliced a human gene into a pig embryo. The pig was born cross-eyed and with a strange, wrinkled face, and with arthritis so severe that it could hardly stand, but the meat was indeed much leaner.

Most people I know say they will try Calgene’s tomato, provided it’s safe, and extensive testing indicates that it is. However, to Calgene’s surprise and bewilderment, some people are actively campaigning against its tomato. The anti-biotechnology activist Jeremy Rifkin is organizing a boycott of the Flavr Savr. “I’m here to tell you this tomato will be dead on arrival,” he has said. “This tomato will go under. This tomato will find no market.” Rifkin’s boycott has found support among people in different areas of environmental politics–organic-food people, biodiversity people, genetic-privacy people–who have their own reasons for not liking recombinant DNA, and all of whom are comfortable with the notion that instead of genetically altering a tomato to suit human habits we should alter our habits to suit the tomato. More than twenty-five hundred restaurants nationwide, including “21,” Chez Panisse, and Spago, have said they will not serve Calgene’s tomato, and in some restaurant windows one is beginning to see the boycott symbol–a coil of DNA with a red slash through it.

Roger Salquist, whose company has spent twenty-five million dollars to develop the Flavr Savr, believes that his tomato will prevail. “The nice thing about this situation is that all these issues–science, business, people’s religion, what have you–come down to a tomato,” he told me. “If people like our tomato, the rest of this stuff goes away.”

George Ball’s family has been in the genetics business for three generations. His grandfather bred asters, sweet peas, snapdragons, and calendulas, and eventually turned those interests into Geo. J. Ball, Inc., which has diversified holdings in horticultural research and seed production. George, who is forty-one years old, spent part of his youth on a petunia-breeding farm in Costa Rica and now runs the company. He is also the president of the American Horticultural Society and the chief executive officer of Atlee Burpee & Company, the country’s largest supplier of seeds for home gardening. George’s enthusiasm for what recombinant DNA offers the plant breeder is unclouded by any haunting feeling that man is going to have to pay for overstepping his place in the world. It puzzles George that people doubt or criticize rDNA, as it is known, and he sometimes says that they must be motivated by some sort of “religious thing,” although George’s faith in rDNA more nearly resembles a religious conviction than anything I encountered on the other side. “I personally believe that this is another green revolution,” George says. “It’s quantum-leap technology. It’s going to be bigger than frozen food.”

Edward Madigan, who was Secretary of Agriculture under Bush, is one of many informed and responsible people who agree with George. “The coming of age of biotechnology in agriculture promises to make rapid and far-reaching progress that will dwarf the advances of the previous age of agricultural mechanization and the harnessing of chemistry,” Madigan has said. One of the brightest promises held out by rDNA is that it will allow farmers to stop using chemicals. Last year, American farmers dumped some twenty-five million pounds of chemicals on corn alone, to kill rootworm. The Mycogen Corporation, of San Diego, is developing a corn plant that produces the toxin in a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which kills rootworm. “It’s quite possible that in five years cornfields will be pesticide-free,” says Michael Sund, the director of corporate communications at Mycogen.

Many other promises are also made for rDNA: It will increase productivity. It will create crops capable of growing in the deserts of Somalia and in the mountains of Peru. It will give us vegetables higher in nutrients, and cooking oils lower in saturated fat. It will feed the huge increase in population expected in underdeveloped countries over the next twenty-five years. Biotechnology is the one major industry in which the United States is the undisputed world leader; the profits from these products will flow into our country and make us rich again.

As a time-and-labor-saving innovation, rDNA is to classical plant breeding as the computer is to the typewriter. Classical breeding is confining, because the breeder has to breed the selected plant with a close relative, and it is messy, because along with the desired trait the plant inherits a lot of unwanted traits. With recombinant DNA, the breeder can use genes from virtually any species, plant or animal–even human–and he can target each gene precisely, cut it out, clone it, and splice it into the DNA of the selected plant. The basic techniques of recombinant DNA are not difficult. College biology students are using the technology now, and before long it will be possible to synthesize DNA with a home chemistry set.

“It’s incredible!” George Ball said as we were eating lunch one day in Manhattan. “What used to take ten years now takes one or two. And the possibilities for new plant varieties are mind-boggling. You know, true blue is a very difficult color to achieve in nature. I believe we’ll see a blue rose in three years.”

I said, “But isn’t there something unnatural about all this?”

George said, “I don’t see why. Recombinant DNA is just a way of speeding up what takes place in nature–and maybe of taking nature in a direction it wouldn’t go ordinarily, because nature isn’t organized that way.”

“But isn’t recombinant DNA in fact a way of replacing natural selection with human selection?”

“I don’t see how man, in using recombinant DNA, is doing something unnatural, when man is part of nature, too.”

“Well, what if a genetically engineered organism mutates out of control and attacks Cleveland?”

“Actually, recombinant DNA is safer than classical breeding in that regard, because it reduces the chance of escape mutations. Not that escapes ever happen outside of science-fiction fantasies.”

“But don’t you worry that we might be upsetting nature’s delicate balance?”

“Nature isn’t a delicate balance. What’s so balanced about it?”

There is no shaking George’s faith. Changing the subject, I asked, “So when will Burpee’s first recombinant-DNA product appear?”

George looked aghast. “Oh, Burpee doesn’t use recombinant DNA. Look at the trouble it’s caused Calgene. I can’t afford that kind of backlash.”

The headquarters of Calgene is a plain concrete building surrounded by tomato fields, on the edge of Davis, California. Eighty per cent of all the processing tomatoes grown in the United States are grown within fifty miles of the building, including the “square” tomato, which is bred for machine harvesting and represents the pinnacle of a certain kind of tomato technology. In the reception area at Calgene is an illustrated encyclopedia of fruits and vegetables, and I leaf through it while waiting for my tour to begin. The tomato is classified with the vegetables–it was, in fact, declared a vegetable by an act of Congress. Botanically, it is a fruit, because it forms an ovary. I turn to the illustration of the banana and wonder if one day it will look like an antique. Stephen Benoit, the Calgene Fresh vice-president, appears and leads me into the employees’ lunch area to talk. On the way in, he spots a newspaper article about the Flavr Savr pinned up on a bulletin board: it is illustrated with a drawing of a tomato strapped to an operating table with electrodes attached to it and a mad scientist about to throw the switch. Benoit looks pained. “I just wish they would stop using these dumb drawings,” he says.

Benoit explains what the Flavr Savr is designed to do. “Our tomato will stay firm for seven to ten days longer than the average tomato. The way we’ve done that is we’ve isolated the gene that tells the tomato to get soft, made a copy of it, and inserted it backwards, using our proprietary Antisense technology. So instead of telling the tomato to get soft when it’s ripe the Antisense gene tells it not to get soft. That will allow us to leave our tomato on the vine longer, and get more of the back-yard flavor into it, but still have a tomato that is firm enough to ship.”

I am confused about whether Calgene is going to keep the tomato on the vine an extra seven to ten days, which would make it taste better, and therefore would benefit the consumer, or whether the seven to ten days will be added to the tomato’s shelf life, which would benefit the seller. Benoit says that the tomato will spend about half the extra time on the vine. It will be picked at the “breaker stage,” when it is just beginning to show color. “As you know, the great majority of tomatoes you buy in the supermarket are picked green, before all the sugars get into them,” he says. “Then they’re reddened, using ethylene gas. The industry has come up with the concept of the mature green tomato, which means a green tomato picked just before it shows color. The trouble is that the pickers, who work on a per-basket basis, don’t have the time to tell the difference between a mature green and an immature green, and they pick a lot of tomatoes long before they’re ripe. We won’t pick any tomatoes before they show color–that way we’ll know how ripe they are.”

I ask how the Flavr Savr will be different from vine-ripened tomatoes, which are also picked at the breaker stage.

“The vine-ripes have only four to seven days of shelf life,” Benoit says. “So the distributors have to refrigerate them, and that destroys the flavor. Never refrigerate a tomato. We won’t have to refrigerate our tomato, because of the extended shelf life. And we will control our tomatoes from the grower to the supermarket to insure that they are never chilled.”

I ask a few questions about Antisense, Calgene’s patented method of manipulating the tomato’s DNA, and Benoit suggests that we go find a plant scientist in the lab for a more detailed explanation. The lab is down the hall from the lunch area. Men and women in white lab coats are working at benches strewn with test-tube racks, dishes of agar, and microscopes. Steve Vanderpan, a young man wearing a lab coat and a ponytail, explains some of the details of Antisense. “The gene we’re working with is the PG gene–for ‘polygalacturonase.’ PG is an enzyme that degrades pectin, a polymer in the walls of tomato cells. PG is there so that the tomato can get its seeds into the ground quickly. It would be extremely difficult, using sexual reproduction, to select for a non-PG-gene-bearing tomato. Our guys just cut the PG gene out, using restriction enzymes. Then we make up an Antisense gene. We attach a kanamycin-resistant gene to the Antisense gene as a marker, and we install this construct in the DNA of a disarmed agribacterium–the sort of thing that produces a crown gall on a tree. We expose tomato cells to the agribacterium, and it injects its DNA, which contains the Antisense gene, into the tomato DNA.”

Vanderpan leads the way out the other end of the lab into a corridor with a series of tightly sealed doors, and opens a door marked “Tissue Culture Room Seven.” We are bathed in pure-white grow lights. In metal racks below the lights are hundreds of petri dishes, each containing tomato cells, some already generated into plant tissue, resting in agar. Vanderpan says, “Now, remember the kanamycin gene we installed in our Antisense PG? Well, kanamycin is an antibiotic. If the Antisense-kanamycin construct is successfully implanted in the tomato plant’s DNA, the antibiotic will fight off the bacteria in the petri dish, and the tomato cells will live. If not, they’ll die.”

I ask, “So all these buds will grow into tomato plants?”

“Yes, but some of them we won’t want,” Vanderpan says. “We have no control over where the Antisense gene lines up on the genome.”

I had not realized this. “Really?”

“Recombinant DNA doesn’t give you that control–yet. Sometimes the gene is going to end up in the wrong place on the genome, which means that the tomato will probably develop into an undesirable mutant and we’ll have to kill it. We may not know till we grow them out in the greenhouse.”

The greenhouses are a quarter mile from the main building. Driving there, Benoit and I pass several tract-home developments, with no houses built yet–just big, forlorn, ugly stone walls standing in the middle of some tomato fields. Calgene’s greenhouse manager, Karen McGuire, takes us into the thick hothouse heat. We stroll among great expanses of genetically engineered tomatoes of all sizes and varieties. One plant is ten feet tall. McGuire fingers through some leaves and finds a small ripe tomato, picks it, and hands it to me. The color is beautiful, almost ruby. McGuire says, “See how ripe that is? But feel the firmness.”

I squeeze the tomato. I toss it a few feet up in the air and catch it. I say, “So are you going to let me taste this thing?”

Benoit hesitates.

“Just one bite,” I say.

McGuire says, “You might want to wash it first,” carries it over to a faucet, runs water on it, and hands it to me.

In the eighteenth century, the tomato was widely believed to be poisonous, because it is a relative of nightshade, and to be diabolical, on account of its lurid color and the resemblance of its skin to human skin. A turning point in human-tomato relations came in 1820, when a man named Robert Gibbon Johnson sat on the steps of the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, and, watched by a large crowd, ate two tomatoes. By a strange coincidence, I also come from Salem, New Jersey. In my home town, on a local holiday each August, a man in Colonial garb stands on the courthouse steps and raises a fresh South Jersey tomato to his mouth while spectators cry, “No! Don’t do it!” I feel that the tomato I am holding is a transmitter connecting me to the real Robert Gibbon Johnson. I realize I am a little afraid of this tomato. I ask myself, “Do I want to do this?” Then I raise the tomato to my mouth.

If you live in a city but come from somewhere else, chances are that you have a perfect tomato somewhere in your past, which you picked from the vine when it was warm from the sun, and bit into like an apple, and will never forget, which actually tasted like a fruit, like a big grape, exploding juice into all parts of your mouth. But then you moved away from home and lost touch with the people you knew, and you left the back-yard tomatoes behind. Your desire for a better tomato is in part the desire for the back yard you no longer have. There are people who say that through science the back yard can be restored to you, and there are other people who believe that placing your faith in science only carries you farther away from the back yard.

I take a bite of the tomato. Keeping in mind that it was a hothouse tomato, and that hothouse tomatoes are generally not as good as outdoor tomatoes, and that it was grown from a variety that might not be the variety I buy in the store, and that the circumstances of the tasting were unscientific, I have to say that the Flavr Savr was not the tomato of my dreams.

I walk around Manhattan wearing a pin with the symbol of the Pure Food Campaign, Jeremy Rifkin’s organization–the double helix with a red slash through it. Under the symbol are the words “I DO NOT Buy Genetically Engineered Food.” On the subway, people furtively glance at the pin, squint uncomprehendingly, glance away. No one expresses solidarity with me. I wear the pin to a cocktail party on the Upper West Side. People seem angry with me. Sarah, a lawyer at a big Manhattan firm, says she is perfectly happy eating genetically engineered food and isn’t going to stop just because it’s suddenly fashionable not to. “I mean, what isn’t genetically engineered? When you get right down to it?” she says. I wear the pin while I’m picking up an airline ticket in Rockefeller Center. A woman behind the ticket counter says, “You could drive yourself crazy thinking about this stuff. In church? On Sunday? When the guy next to me offers the sign of peace? I’m thinking, Now, where’s his hand been? Because you don’t know. Especially with the men. But I take it anyway, because what else are you going to do?”

I call people who are on record as having a problem with recombinant DNA in agriculture. Many of them recall similarly optimistic predictions being made by manufacturers of agricultural chemicals in the nineteen-forties, and think it is worth proceeding cautiously with recombinant DNA now to avoid the biotechnological equivalent of DDT. Shepherd Ogden, a Vermont seedsman and the publisher of The Cook’s Garden seed catalogue, wonders why we need to prove that we can increase the production of corn when we already have an oversupply and are paying farmers not to produce corn. “A lot of us think that high tech is just not in the long run the way agriculture is going to go,” he says. “When the petroleum runs out, and when water in California gets too expensive, the economic basis of a large part of our current agricultural system, where we grow something in California and truck it three thousand miles, will be marginalized. We’ve been high-tech-farming for fifty years, which is not a terrifically long time in human history. We’ve been farming organically for ten thousand years.”

When I tell Margaret Mellon, a biotechnology expert at the National Wildlife Federation, about the guy from Mycogen who said that engineering a corn plant to produce Bt will do away with pesticides in corn farming in five years, she makes a derisive snorting sound into the phone. “That corn plant is going to express Bt in every one of its cells, so that not just rootworm but anything that chews on it gets the Bt. Bt is a safe, biodegradable pesticide. In anywhere from five to ten years, pests will evolve that are resistant to Bt, and that will be the end of a perfectly good pesticide, and we may have to start using even more chemicals on rootworm. And what happens when Bt spreads into trees and grass and the butterflies and moths start chewing on it?”

I go to see Rebecca Goldburg, a scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, on Park Avenue. Some of the work she does concerns herbicide-tolerant plants. She tells me that the French chemical company Rhône-Poulenc funded Calgene’s development of a cotton plant that tolerates bromoxynil, a herbicide manufactured by Rhône-Poulenc. At present, farmers can use only limited amounts of bromoxynil without killing their cotton. Rhône-Poulenc hopes that Calgene’s cotton plants will allow the farmer to use much more bromoxynil, which would be good for the farmer, because it would increase yield, and good for Calgene, which would be selling the technology, and good for Rhône-Poulenc, which is already selling the bromoxynil. The public would also benefit, according to the industry, because supposedly bromoxynil is less toxic than some other herbicides, although, Goldburg points out, it is toxic enough to cause cancer in rats and to make the Environmental Protection Agency require that workers who apply it wear protective suits.

I say, “That doesn’t sound like the road to chemical-free agriculture.”

Goldburg studies me for a while. “No, it doesn’t,” she says.

Goldburg says there are two big questions that consumers should ask: “Will the use of antibiotics like kanamycin induce antibiotic tolerance, especially in children?” and “Will DNA taken from an allergenic food, like a peanut, make the host food allergenic, too?” She says that the chance that either event will happen is low. Then she says, “I think a lot of people just don’t feel right in their gut about recombinant DNA in agriculture–they feel on some level it’s not right to mix plant and animal genes. But, unfortunately, health concerns are the only mechanism available to them to express their doubts. We have to talk about whether these products are safe, not whether they are necessary or desirable.”

I have lunch with an old college friend, Wilson Kidde, who is now the president of International Agritech Resources, an agricultural technology-information service, and who is the nearest thing I can find to an objective source. I point out to him that Kraft, General Foods, Kellogg, Beatrice, and Nabisco, which are among the largest food companies in the United States, have relatively small investments in recombinant DNA, and that the leaders in the field are Du Pont, Upjohn, Bayer, Dow, Monsanto, Ciba-Geigy, and Rhône-Poulenc–companies with the research budgets, staff, and facilities to do advanced rDNA work. I say it seems to me that the drug and chemical companies, whose own market in pesticides is being threatened by companies like Mycogen, are using recombinant DNA as a wedge to get into the food business, and that if they are successful the companies that supply us with aspirin and weed killer may one day supply our produce, meat, and dairy.

Wilson says, “Well, it’s a value-added revolution. Adding value to food, whether you do it by preserving it or cooking it or packaging it, or all three at once, as in the case of Swanson TV dinners, is the usual way a company gets into the food business. Kellogg adds value to corn by turning it into cornflakes. Recombinant DNA is just a new way of adding value to food, but doing it earlier in the production chain, as it were–at the level of DNA, before the food companies can get their hands on it.”

Campbell Soup is one of the few traditional food companies that invested early in rDNA. Campbell has put millions of dollars into Calgene, and it owns the patent on the PG gene. In trying to exploit its investment, however, Campbell has been handicapped in a way that Du Pont, say, has not. In December, Campbell received a letter from Jeremy Rifkin threatening to boycott the company unless Campbell dissociated itself from genetically engineered products. In January, in a letter to the Times, James Moran, the director of public relations at Campbell, said, “Campbell does not market any bioengineered products and has no plans to do so. . . . Before any such use would even be contemplated, we would have to be assured that such use has full governmental approval and strong consumer acceptance.” The impression many observers got from this sequence of letters was that Campbell was so worried for fear the stigma of rDNA would damage its reputation for wholesomeness that it immediately gave in to Rifkin’s demands.

I ask Wilson, “Do you really think Campbell’s reputation could be hurt by using recombinant DNA?”

Wilson says, “Well, the very fact that Campbell even has to worry about it puts the company at a disadvantage. I mean, a manufacturer of pesticides doesn’t have to worry so much about its reputation for wholesomeness.”

When Roger Salquist took his tomato to the Food and Drug Administration, in 1991, the agency did not have a policy on genetically engineered foods. The decision that the F.D.A. had to make came down to this: Is foreign DNA a food additive, in which case a genetically engineered tomato is a processed food and requires a label, like a can of tomato soup, or is recombinant DNA simply an extension of classical plant breeding, in which case the genetically engineered tomato is a whole food, like a tangerine or seedless grapes, and requires no label? Salquist argued that his tomato should be regulated and sold like any other tomato, without a label. Many people in the industry felt that to label a genetically engineered vegetable “Genetically Engineered” would hurt sales, and that submitting a food-additive petition, which is a long and expensive undertaking, would be a difficult burden for small companies like Calgene to bear.

The F.D.A.’s decision, announced in May, 1992, was that DNA from another organism is not a food additive, and that the use of recombinant DNA is in no regulatory sense different from classical plant breeding. If the donor organism is a known allergen, the F.D.A. will require the manufacturer to do additional testing, but the mere fact that the donor is a peanut, a pig, or a human being will not require a label. It was the policy that Salquist and the industry had asked for. Unfortunately, it was announced by Vice-President Dan Quayle. Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness had taken a special interest in the matter, and in his speech Quayle welcomed the policy, saying that it would provide regulatory relief for the biotech industry. “That was the dumbest thing Quayle could have done, because it allowed the environmental groups to raise the food-safety issue,” Salquist told me. In an effort to restore his tomato’s reputation, Salquist decided to go back to the F.D.A. and request that the marker gene be considered a food additive–in effect, to ask for the very regulation he had argued against. Now Vice-President Al Gore is working with the F.D.A. to determine whether the 1992 policy on genetically engineered foods needs to be revised.

From Calgene’s point of view, the worst thing about the F.D.A.’s policy was the inspiration it gave to Jeremy Rifkin. When you read one of Rifkin’s jeremiads, or see Rifkin on a consumer-affairs segment of the evening news, you get the impression that he is a zealot. In person, however, Rifkin is pleasant and charmingly self-deprecating. With his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie loosened, and a smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners, Rifkin seems more like a lobbyist than an activist. This is the Rifkin of “Life in the Third Millennium,” a one-day interdisciplinary seminar he offers to colleges and other organizations around the country, for five thousand dollars a pop plus expenses.

In his Washington office, on Seventeenth Street Northwest, Rifkin has two walls of books–one with all his intellectual influences, who include Mumford, Roszak, Marcuse, Rank, Jung, and Reich, and the other with various editions of Rifkin’s own books, which include “Algeny,” “Beyond Beef,” “Biosphere Politics,” and “Declaration of a Heretic.” The books form a right angle; you enter through a doorway at the point of the angle. I passed through the doorway and took a seat. Rifkin came around from behind his desk and sat near me, looking into my eyes. I said that in my reporting I had been impressed by the speed and urgency with which intellectual property was being acquired by biotech companies. If a company comes up with a plausible use for a particular gene, it can obtain a patent that covers not only that use but also the gene itself. For example, Calgene’s tomato is covered by two trademarks and two patents, including a patent on the Antisense method and, most important, a patent on the gene that causes pectin breakdown in the cell walls of the tomato. Therefore, even if the Flavr Savr doesn’t work, Calgene (or Campbell) can demand a royalty from anyone else who uses the PG gene. The situation bore the marks of a landgrab, I said.

Rifkin leaned toward me and rested his forearms on his knees, and said, “What we’re seeing here is the conversion of DNA into a commodity, and it is in some ways the ideal corporate commodity–it’s small, it’s ownable, it’s easily transportable, and it lasts forever.” A swift, allusive elaboration of that point followed. Then came a metaphor: “Genetic engineering is the final enclosure movement. It is the culmination of the enclosure of the village commons that began five hundred years ago. As we have developed as a society and we have moved from an agricultural to a pyrochemical to a biotechnical culture”–three sorting movements with his hands mark these cultures–“we have seen that whoever controls the land or the fossil fuels or, now, the DNA controls society. Control the gene pool and you control life!”

Rifkin’s argument against genetically engineered food is composed of four different arguments–the safety argument, the ethical argument, the anticorporate argument, and the sustainable-agriculture argument–loaded into alternating chambers and fired so rapidly that the rounds are hard to distinguish from one another. His unique talent is to locate the metaphor that draws the disparate parts of his argument together and gives conjecture the force and solidity of fact. The thing about Rifkin that drives people in the biotechnology industry crazy is that they cannot understand why he is against them–he seems to be motivated neither by high principle nor greed. The obvious great pleasure he gets from encapsulating four hundred years of thought in five minutes, bundling it all up attractively, and delivering it to an audience must be, as far as I can figure, its own reward.

Rifkin floats more or less by himself in the galaxy of green politics, having had no long-term alliances with major environmental organizations. The environmentalists I know regard Rifkin as somewhat outlandish but savor him as a kind of guilty pleasure, since few people are better than Rifkin at getting under a corporation’s skin. And the idea of Rifkin has many defenders. Even people in the biotech industry will concede that Rifkin provokes debate and that in the long run debate is good, because it is the only way the public’s apprehension about recombinant DNA will go away.

I asked Rifkin whether he thought that Calgene’s tomato was safe. He leaned forward again, lowered his voice confidingly, and said that Calgene’s tomato probably is safe. Then he gave me an argument. “The tomato is the classic example of the old way of thinking: whatever increases productivity is good and will find a market,” he said. “I call it World’s Fair thinking. But now we have a new way of thinking. What we will see in food in the nineties is going to be a battle between the World’s Fair view of the world and the new, ecologically based stewardship of the world. Food is an intimate issue. I’m telling you food is going to be the focus of all green-oriented politics. And this is only going to gather momentum–in a year, this movement is going to be so strong that no genetically engineered product will make it to the supermarket. I think Calgene has miscalculated in the most profound way. It spent an enormous amount of money and it never asked the simplest question: Do people want this tomato? And I say people don’t want this tomato. The bottom line is, who needs it?”

Jay Taylor, a Florida tomato grower who will be growing the Flavr Savr, told me a story to illustrate how the tomato business works. “A few years back, I sold a guy six loads of tomatoes in Virginia on August 12th,” he said. A load is a full semitrailer. “On September 17th, I was up in Detroit and I ran into the guy I sold those tomatoes to. I said, ‘Hey, did you sell those tomatoes?’ He said, ‘Nope. I still got ’em.’ He had those six loads of tomatoes in his coolers–he was waiting for the price to go up, so he could make a profit. You know who he ended up selling ’em to? McDonald’s.”

This is the main reason that supermarket tomatoes taste bad. Tomato distributors, in essence, run a futures market. The longer the shelf life of a tomato, the greater the probability that all the people who speculate on tomatoes–salesmen, repackers, warehousers, and retailers–can sell them for more than they bought them for. The wholesale market is very large, and a lot of money is involved; the price of a twenty-five-pound box of tomatoes can move from six dollars to eighteen dollars in ten days. Interests are entrenched. When I asked Calgene Fresh’s Tom Churchwell how he was going to cope with this problem, he said, “We’ve changed the way the tomatoes are picked and the way the pickers are paid, we’ve changed the packing materials, we’ve invented our own packing machine, which will treat the tomatoes much more gently, and we’re going to ship our tomatoes in good air-ride trailers, using truckers who are paid for the quality of what they deliver, not just the bulk, and we’ll repack the tomatoes ourselves in our new service center outside Chicago.”

“And how are you going to pay for that?”

“Well, if you can consistently deliver a quality tomato, you can put a brand name on it. And if you can brand your tomatoes you can charge a premium for them, and that allows you to pay for the other stuff.” (Calgene plans to charge around three dollars a pound for its tomatoes.)

In Florida, most of the people I talked to felt that compared with reforming the tomato business genetic engineering is easy. In Homestead, which is in one of the state’s major tomato-growing regions, I talked about this with a tomato salesman named Ed Angrisani. Tomato salesmen enjoy a mythic status within the tomato business. They control dozens of truckloads of tomatoes a day, and they can earn more than a million dollars a year. Angrisani is a powerful-looking man, and he wears a gold necklace, a big gold ring, and a fabulous gold Rolex watch. I had previously met three tomato growers, and all of them wore gold Rolex watches, but Angrisani’s was the biggest.

Angrisani’s office had been wrecked six months earlier by Hurricane Andrew, and it had new doors, which made the air fragrant with oak. He was on the phone selling tomatoes when I came in. On his desk were invoices for loads to Vancouver, Los Angeles, Louisville, Hunts Point Market, in the Bronx, and other destinations–his morning’s work. When he got off the phone, I said that it seemed to me that when people at Calgene talked about reforming the tomato business they were talking about reforming people like Angrisani himself, and did Angrisani feel threatened by that?

Angrisani didn’t look threatened. He smiled and put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “I personally would like to see Calgene succeed,” he said. “Maybe Calgene’s tomatoes will sell themselves, and I hope they do. Or it might be that they’ll need a guy like me to sell their tomatoes for them. I mean, if it were just a matter of sitting here waiting for the phone to ring, growers wouldn’t need guys like me. What separates the men from the boys in this business is whether you can sell your tomatoes when nobody wants them, when you’ve got a whole field that’s just going to rot out there”–he waved toward the window–“unless you can move ’em out.”

Angrisani scratched the side of his face for a while. Then he said, “I’ve got customers who know that when the supply is tight they can call me and I’ll sell ’em a load. So when I get oversupplied I can call them and say, ‘Hey, I know you don’t need it, but how about buying a load?’ And they’ll say, ‘We’ll send the truck.’ It took me sixteen years to get to where I had the relationships to do that. Now, maybe the folks at Calgene think they can come in and do it overnight–and, like I say, I wish ’em the best–but it’s not a simple deal.”

The phone rang. Angrisani said into it, “Make sure we get eight dollars a box. He owes us one dollar.”

As I was leaving, I asked Angrisani for a card. He said, “I don’t have any cards. They were all washed away in the hurricane.” I drove through Homestead on the way back to Miami. Roads were lined with chainsawed sections of avocado and lime trees, and there were rotting piles of furniture and appliances on almost every street corner. All the street signs were uprooted and had concrete clinging to the bottom of the poles like hunks of sod. Tomatoes were just about the only living thing I saw. Tomatoes were everywhere, thriving.

A century ago, in June, 1893, Luther Burbank began publishing his catalogue “New Creations in Fruit and Flowers.” Burbank was already celebrated for creating the Burbank potato, whose resistance to disease was far superior to that of existing potatoes. But with “New Creations,” which introduced to the world his hybrid plums and prunes, Burbank’s celebrity climbed almost to the level of Edison’s. In newspapers he was portrayed as a saint. Edward Wickson, a professor of horticulture at the University of California, wrote at the turn of the century, when Burbank was at the height of his fame, “He could hear the ‘still small voice’ without preparatory earthquake or whirlwind. Like David of old he could do his work with smooth pebbles from the brook; and he cast aside the elaborate armament of his scientific brethren lest it should impede his movements.”

That kind of plant breeder, who was as much an artist as a scientist, and who, working within prescribed limits of nature, performed miracles, will probably disappear with the coming of recombinant DNA. While I was in Davis for my tour of Calgene, I went to see one of the last of the heroic master breeders, Dr. Charles M. Rick. That the tomatoes you are growing this year don’t die of blight or yield unevenly or grow too leafy is ultimately attributable to Dr. Rick’s efforts. Since the nineteen-forties, Dr. Rick has been prospecting along the slopes of the Andes, the cradle of Lycopersicon, for novel tomato plants. He discovered a new species of tomato, Solanum rickii, bringing the total of known related wild tomato species to eleven. The specimens he has collected form the bulk of the C. M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center, the largest collection of wild tomato species and genetic stock in the world. The center is on the Davis campus, across town from Calgene. It is the New York Public Library of tomato seeds. On the walls of the center are pictures of amazing tomato plants from around the world–a tomato plant growing on a sandy beach in the Galápagos, a tomato growing at thirty-six hundred metres in Chile, a tomato growing in the Chilean desert, a tomato tree in northern Ecuador standing twenty-five feet high.

Dr. Rick is seventy-eight years old. He has a somewhat scraggly white beard, and long white wisps of hair curl out from under the faded khaki hat he often wears. In his shirt pocket he carries tweezers for emasculating tomato anthers and a probe for pollinating tomato stigmas. His dealings with tomatoes go back to a quasi-mystical experience he had in a tomato field in the early forties. “I was working in genetics at U.C. Davis, and a professor said, ‘Charlie, why don’t you go out to that field and see what causes those tomato plants to be unfruitful.’ The guy was a cantankerous old fellow, and I thought, Oh, man, he would think of something like that. A month later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and said to myself, ‘Rick! You damn fool! You’d better get out there and see those tomatoes!’ So I spent the day in that tomato field, and by the time I came back I was hooked on tomatoes, absolutely hooked.”

I was interested in knowing what Rick thought of Calgene’s tomato. He laughed, and said, “I’ll wait till I taste it.”

I asked, “Well, do you think it’s possible to produce a back-yard supermarket tomato?”

Rick thought for a while, then said, “Well, it is important to keep in mind that, while we have become quite skilled at recombinant DNA, we still don’t really know how genes work, and the more we find out about genes the less simple their behavior appears to be.” He laughed again and scratched his head through his old hat. “I mean, even something like the tomato, which has only a thousand or so genes, and a genome that has been extensively mapped–well, tomatoes are damn tricky things. There are so many things that can go wrong when you breed a tomato–yield, maturation time, quality, uniformity, coloration, size. One little cat face or growth crack and people won’t buy the damn thing. Now, color is relatively easy. It’s not hard to breed a tomato that looks great and tastes like hell.” He laughed. “I’m not entirely convinced that recombinant DNA will do any more for supermarket tomatoes than classical breeding has done. A few years back, the Israelis made a lot of noise saying that they had suppressed the same gene Calgene had, using conventional methods–only, they called theirs the RIN gene. Said they suppressed it with a gene they got out of a wild cherry.”

I spotted what appeared to be some ancient rolls of toilet paper high on a row of cluttered shelves. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

“South American t.p. The aboriginal stuff,” Rick said. He told me to reach up and get a roll. It was yellow with age and looked as if it would do fine for finishing carpentry work. “Recombinant DNA can’t hold a candle to this invention,” Dr. Rick said. “Feel the consistency of that stuff?” He rubbed a sheet between his fingers. “Much better than American toilet paper for wrapping tomato specimens in.”

 

Copyright (c) John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved