Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World: A History by William Alexander

It doesn’t happen that often. But I read something that wasn’t a graphic novel or comic book. My bride tries really hard to broaden my horizons by making suggestions of things she finds at our local library. She understands my philosophy that life is too short to not read comic books. But I think she also wants to experience the joy of finding something non-comic book related that I will read.

10 Tomatoes That Changed The World is a mix of culinary history, multicultural travel guide, botany text book and farmers almanac. Just don’t expect there to be exactly 10 tomatoes being focused on in this book. Instead, after chapter 3 or 4, the focus will be on a variety of tomato and not just a single love apple that caused humanity, especially the Italians and us Americans, to vastly change how and what we ate.

Rocketing towards the end of the book, author William Alexander looks at how the Roma tomato gave birth to the modern pizza, why tomatoes from Florida taste awful (especially when raw) and if the hothouse tomatoes of Canada will save our planet from global warming. I found the history of the tomato fascinating. The author does a great job capturing how curious cooks and farmers around the world took a chance on the lowly tomato and developed the vegetable-not-fruit into one of the most abundant and popular foods on the market today. My eyes did glaze over a bit when William Alexander talked about plant genetics. But that boredom is possibly not any sort of fault of the author’s. I got bored with those sections of the Botany class I took in college. 

One thing notably missing from this book: the origins of the La Tomatina festival in Spain where people throw tomatoes at each other and if that has anything to do with throwing the savory-ish fruit at terrible comedians!

William Alexander does put a lot of himself into this book. That irked me a tiny bit until I read his ‘About the Author’ blurb on the back cover flap and realized that it was just his writing style. He’s almost like a culinary investigative reporter taking us onto the scenes of the culinary crime he’s researching. However, I did feel like there were a few times that he spent too much time on a series of clues that were just red herrings.

In chapter 10, Alexander keeps alluding to the final scene of this Chekov (the Russian playwright, not the Russian helmsman of the USS Enterprise) play in which some guy's cherry trees get cut down. It all has something to do with sustainability and ecology. I didn’t see the connection really. Truly, I could overlook some of these tangents. But the one thing about this book that still gets up my crawl has to do with a pizza maker from Naples.

In chapter 4, the author goes back in time to talk about a 19-year old pizza maker named Luigi Mattozzi. On May 4th, 1850, Luigi and his family have to move to a new apartment as that was the day all apartment leases were to be vacated citywide. 4 pages later, Mattiozzi’s family is mentioned once more in terms of describing how a period family lived in Naples. And that’s it for Luigi and the fam. So my question is- did I miss something? This seemed like such an odd thing to bring up this random guy and not tie him in directly with the origins of pizza which are covered truth and folklore alike to great detail. Yet, not having any sort of closure about this guy is keeping me up at nights!

I may have to do something I rarely ever do: write the author. I really gotta know why Luigi gets this sweeping introduction and then bupkis. 

As for reading further works by William Alexander, I am open to check out his works on the expense and headaches of gardening as well as his look at the history of bread-making. I think I understand the author’s writing style much better now. I just hope he doesn’t bring up more random people in those works without giving them a proper sendoff into the history books. 

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.