Richard Ha writes:

I’ve said before that “industrial agriculture” has many shortcomings, and a New York Times article that ran this week illustrates some of them.

The article laments that conventional tomatoes are bred to withstand the rigors of the supply chain and other issues farmers face, with good taste being only an afterthought.

It talks about an unconventional tomato called “Ugly Ripe” that tastes good and is available during the winter. The problem? It’s grown using the ozone-depleting chemical methyl bromide, which kills weed seeds and controls a root-damaging insect. The article says that despite the Ugly Ripe’s good taste, it’s not sustainable because it’s grown using methyl bromide.

By contrast, here at Hamakua Springs we grow tomatoes that taste good year round. And we don’t use ozone-depleting chemicals.

Our tomatoes taste good because we very specifically select varieties for taste over any other quality. We harvest when the fruit is vine ripe, which means complex flavors have already developed. We used weed cloth, so we don’t have to spray weeds. Because our operation is hydroponic—soil-free—we don’t have soil-borne insects. All this adds up to good taste and zero need for ozone-depleting methyl bromide.

When the television program Top Chef taped on the Big Island in December, finalist Marcel Vigneron tasted one of our Hamakua Springs tomatoes while selecting ingredients for the final competitions and immediately loaded up his basket. And one of the show’s chef consultants took some tomatoes with her to eat, saying offhandedly that there were no good tomatoes during the winter where she lives. Amazing.

We were also pleased when our Hamakua Springs cocktail tomatoes were selected in a taste test as “best tomato” by 100 master chefs and culinary students during Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s Tomato 101 seminar in Honolulu. That was just last month—also in the winter.

Good tasting AND sustainable both! We must be doing something right.