Flavor Comes Last

Have you ever had a tomato that looked perfect but tasted like nothing? You wouldn't be alone: 217,000 webpages complain about tasteless tomatoes and another 66,000 write on flavorless tomatoes. In an era of consumer sovereignty, this seems a little odd. Why do we spend $4 billion [USDA] on tomatoes if we don't like their flavor?

Maybe it's all in our minds? Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Committee says, "Everybody has an emotional attachment with a tomato they've grown and the memory of that taste," Brown says. "If you hold me to the standard of the tomato that you're emotionally attached to, I'll never meet that standard. You can't beat a memory." [USA Today] Mr. Brown puts a clever spin on the question, but I'd bet most people could identify a good tomato in a blind taste test.

We usually don't buy produce via a blind tasting. Instead, we use appearance to judge quality. Is the tomato rotten? Is it soft and wrinkled? How's the color? Are there bad spots? Was it smashed in shipping? If it's bad, we don't buy.

Producers respond by providing us with tomatoes that are unblemished, shiny, round, and uniformly red. Flavor? Flavor literally comes last. It isn't observable until after we buy and then it's too late. The firms' incentives are to produce perfect-looking tomatoes that ship well.

Growers typically harvest tomatoes while they are green and hard, since green tomatoes are more durable than tender vine-ripened fruit. Ethylene gas can turn green tomatoes red, but their taste and texture usually doesn't match a ripe tomato. The result: hundreds of thousands of unsatisfied customers.

Could a firm produce good-tasting tomatoes and profit from this market failure? Maybe. There's certainly a business opportunity there. But they can only be successful if consumers are able to identify the tasty tomatoes. So the question becomes, how can growers signal that they have a better tomato?

Branding is common way to differentiate consumer products, but it's generally difficult to brand vegetables in a meaningful way. One big Florida producer came up with an interesting solution-- grow better tasting tomatoes that look different from the usual tomato. Ordinary commercial tomatoes look perfect, so in order to differentiate, they market the UglyRipe tomato. UglyRipe is a beefsteak tomato with lumps and bumps that visually distinguish it from the typical supermarket tomato. The Florida Tomato Committee (a Depression-era institution that controls the winter tomato market) suppressed the UglyRipe for several years until a 2007 USDA ruling allowed it to be shipped out of state. [CBS]

It's not really the ugliness that makes this tomato tastier. The same tomato, picked hard green, would be flavorless. Ripe is the key in UglyRipe. The lumpiness is simply a marker for the investment in flavor quality that this producer made. They aren't alone. Selling tomatoes on the vine is another visually distinctive method of identifying an invisible attribute. The vine itself doesn't contribute to the flavor.

It's late summer in the southern hemisphere, so I'm able to get ripe local tomatoes at the Farmers' markets in Uruguay, but next year when I'm back in Kalamazoo I'll be looking for branded tomatoes. If you get a chance to try them sooner, let me know.

Nutmeg for New York

You probably know the story of Peter Miniut buying Manhattan in 1626 for $24 worth of beads and you may be familiar with the compound interest calculation that shows $24, invested for nearly four hundred years, grows enough to buy back the entire island at current real-estate prices, but what's less well-known is why the Dutch gave Manhattan to the British.

The answer, surprisingly, is nutmeg.

In 1667, the Dutch traded Manhattan for the island of Run, described by David Quammen as "the world’s most inconspicuous yet eloquent symbol of changing commodity values and myopic diplomacy." Run, a British colonial foothold in the Spice Islands, provided a competitive alternative to the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg.

Quammen explains:

Early spice cargoes were sold in Amsterdam at as much as 32,000 percent markup, and so the Dutch burghers who had financed those expeditions moved quickly to corner the trade. To eliminate competition among themselves, they united in 1602 as the Dutch East India Company. To eliminate international competition, they began nudging aside the Portuguese, who had reached the Moluccas first; the Spanish, who had gained a regional foothold in the Philippines ; and the British, who had established an East India Company of their own. The Dutch focused on the Bandas, where the other colonial powers had no prior commanding presence, and in 1611 they built a fort on the slope above Bandaneira. Meanwhile the British had established a more modest trading post on Run, just a few miles eastward. The British, if Muller’s book can be trusted, offered better prices for nutmeg than the Dutch. And the Dutch company made itself still more unpopular with the Bandanese people by demanding a monopoly concession. This led to rebellion, murder, reprisal, and war—between the Dutch and the Bandanese, between the Dutch and the British. At one early stage, the Dutch tortured and beheaded eighteen (or eight, depending on which source you believe) British subjects for conspiring to subvert Dutch colonial authority. That caused a stink back in England, but the Bandanese fared even worse.
The Dutch company officials were truculent, firm, and purblind, as imperialists of all flags usually are. Beginning in 1621, under a fierce governor-general named Jan Pieterszoon Coen, they began killing off the Bandanese population. Another measure was equally barbaric, though less bloody: They also killed nutmeg trees. They did their best to extirpate M. fragrans from most of its range—everywhere but on those few islands where Dutch hegemony was absolute, namely Ambon and the larger Bandas.
...
For almost two centuries, people everywhere bought nutmeg from the Dutch East India Company or not at all. And when the supply threatened to sate the demand, the company willfully destroyed tons of its own nutmeg in order to reinflate prices.

That seems like a lot of effort to control something we sprinkle on eggnog, but in that era spices were world-changing. Venice flourished from its Mediterranean trade in spices. Portugal and Spain, followed by Holland and England, became maritime adventurers to break Venetian control of international trade. Columbus wasn't an explorer in the modern sense; he accidently discovered the Americas as part of a commercial gambit in the spice trade.

Spices financed the Age of Discovery but the spice trade's global importance pre-dates Columbus and Magellan by centuries. "The global aspect of the dealer’s trade is nothing new. As far back as 2600BC, there are records of the Egyptians feeding spices obtained from Asia to labourers building the great pyramid of Cheops, to give them strength. Archeological evidence suggests that cloves were quite popular in Syria not long after, despite the fact that, like nutmeg and mace, they came only from the spice islands of what is now Indonesia. ... Europe imported them before Rome was founded." [The Economist]

Today, Run is a quiet tropical isle but Indonesia is still the world's largest nutmeg producer, with Grenada, in Columbus's "West Indies," the other major producer. The desire for monopoly continues. Producers in these two countries formed an international cartel in the 1980s to limit nutmeg output and therefore boost prices. Cartels generally face an internal incentive problem: high prices are very profitable, encouraging producers to sell larger quantities. That, of course, leads to falling prices. The nutmeg cartel collapsed in the 1990s because of this dynamic.

International trade in spices continues, but competition between producing countries keeps prices affordable. It's hard to imagine an empire built on the kitchen spice rack.

Sources


"The Spice Trade, A Taste of Adventure" from The Economist, reprinted in the encyclopedia of spices.
"The Narcotic of Empire: Nutmeg Economics and the Bargain of Breda", The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder (based on his earlier article in Outside Magazine)

Nutmeg and mace - world overview FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)FO: MISC/94/7 Working Paper