Heirloom Schmerloom

Heirlooms! Or not! You actually have no way of knowing and also it doesn’t really matter.

Ah the farmer’s market! The best place to get your hands on delicious heirloom vegetables. All farmers market produce are heirlooms I think. Surely the best tasting foods are heirlooms, right? That’s why the farmer’s market exists. Heirloom heirloom heirloom!

Alright maybe that’s not exactly how you personally think about heirloom vegetables, but I think it’s fair to say that general there’s an impression for various reasons that “heirloom is better”. Is this true though? Well, it depends. The short answer is generally no, but peruse these ramblings further for a more detailed discussion. We’ll talk about on tomatoes here since that seems to be the focus on heirlooms in the mind of the public, but this applies to any other heirloom out there, from flour corn to cucumbers.

Cherokee purples tomatoes. Maybe THE heirloom (behind Brandywines). Definitely the best tasting tomato, no doubt about it.

First, a definition. To take the broadest possible scope, heirlooms are anything that is A) open pollinated seed and B)not developed by a modern commercial plant breeding program C) have some sort of cultural significance. Let’s break these down. First, open pollinated means that you can save seeds from the fruit (unlike hybrids which require particular plants to be crossed with each other produce viable seed). This means the seed is by definition part of a long lineage of growing and seed saving. Second, heirlooms are usually developed by accident, more or less. Farmer Alec notices a tomato in his patch that’s bigger or prettier than the rest of his tomatoes. Seed is saved from that mutant tomato and bam, Alec’s Jumbo Sweet heirloom is born. Or something like that. Third, that heirloom tomato Farmer Alec is propagating winds up being grown by other people around him, who either get seeds from Alec or save their own seeds from fruit they bought from him. Every year people get excited to grow the Alec Jumbo Sweet, it becomes a tradition amongst friends and neighbors. Many heirlooms have a story like this. Then Big Ag comes to town, folks buy from the grocery store, Farmer Alec goes out of business, and the heirloom line dies out. But the renown of the heirloom is such that fifty years later the Chamber of Commerce starts a Alec Jumbo Sweet tomato festival to boost tourism (all tomatoes at the event were grown in Mexico and purchased at the whole sale warehouse of course). OK that was weirdly detailed but if you pay attention to these kinds of things, it should sound familiar.

Notice I didn’t say anything in there about taste. Maybe Alec’s Jumbo Sweet is delicious, or maybe it tastes OK and just happens to grow easily where it first became popular. My point is that heirlooms have a lot more to do with heritage than they have to do with any culinary properties.

“Y’all aren’t making any sense, tomatoes don’t have any flavor”

Some heirlooms of course are renowned for their taste, like Brandywine or Cherokee Purple tomatoes, but these varieties also have serious weaknesses too. They’re not heat tolerant. They’re susceptible to disease. Plants don’t set as much fruit as modern hybrids. The painful truth to the heirloom tomato lover is that tomatoes really don’t want to be growing in eastern North America. They’re originally from upland Ecuador, and really want dry air, warm days and cool nights like the Andes. In the humid east that trifecta is only around for two or three months a year in most places. But a good tomato is such an attractive prospect that probably billions of dollars have gone into research over the years to build a better tomato and were quite successful. If you’re ever given the choice between an 1890s tomato and a 2020s tomato, I would suggest the latter option. Universities and seed companies now breed both open pollinated and hybrid varieties that just annihilate the heirlooms on productivity and disease resistance while also remaining competitive on flavor. I can tell you from experience, tomato growing in South Texas would be a lot harder without varieties like Early Girl and Sungold!

The term heirloom can also be used many ways, and is sometimes abused by commercial growers. For example, these $2.50/lbs organic tomatoes at Central Market are called heirlooms. And on the surface they have a lot of the hallmarks you might look for at a farmer’s market stall. Ribbing (key). Interesting colors. But they’re weirdly perfect right? I’ve had these tomatoes before and I assure you they’re as bland as the normal red ones they sell. Like all greenhouse tomatoes or mass market field tomatoes, the grocery store supply chain just isn’t built for delivering a tasty tomato to your shopping cart, whatever they look like. A tomato picked ripe is just too fragile to transport and store. Even the description makes me mad (“Rich, earthy, and slightly acidic in flavor, these purple/black tomatoes are a great addition to a salad, or a stunning component of a unique caprese!”, give me a break…). So is that an heirloom tomato? Well it turns out you can just kind of use that word however you want really. These can be called heirlooms I think because they sort of look like a true heirloom.

So that was mucho texto about tomatoes, but at the end of the day the main thing to keep in mind about heirlooms is that they are primarily held in such high esteem because of their cultural value. Yes, some can taste better or be prettier or easier to grow in certain specific areas, but those are the things that through some unknowable formula create that cultural value. For our part at Armadillo Gardens, we focus on growing modern hybrids. This is our livelihood, and quality of the fruit and yield are too important to indulge in the cultural value of a certain type of tomato or pepper. There are a few exceptions, but hybrids in general are just too good. Consider the brussels sprout, for example. In ye olden days, brussels sprouts had a pretty deserved reputation of not being that tasty. If you planted heirloom seed from a 1950s (or 1850s) sprout, you would get a plant with relatively low yields and bitter sprouts. Fast forward to 2024 and mad plant scientists have been hard at work on the brussels sprout. Gone are the low yields and bitter sprouts, modern brussels sprouts are large, high yielding with almost sweet tasting sprouts. In this category heirlooms aren’t even grown anymore, even by enthusiasts, because of how much worse they are.

All of the vegetables we grow today were at one point a wild native plant somewhere in the world. That place is where they grow best, and we’re now trying to grow those plants in all sorts of wildly different climates. I appreciate the cultural value and history of heirlooms and don’t like being dependent on seed companies and plant breeders. But the reality is that as long as we’re trying to grow plants way outside of the ecological context in which they evolved, we’re going to need to rely on those types of seeds to try and negate the problems that occur when trying to grow a plant where it doesn’t want to grow.