SOUND OFF: Tomato Festival helps promote essential heirloom varieties
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It’s mid-September and, as any gardener knows, this means it’s harvest season. Gardens are being overrun — in a good way — with squash, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and more. It’s the season of leaving a zucchini on your neighbour’s doorstep. I love the abundance gardening brings and the many opportunities to share that bounty.
One way the Kamloops Farmers’ Market celebrates this bounty is by hosting an annual Tomato Festival. It’s a fun way for market vendors and customers to share their tomato harvests and to enter into a light-hearted competition with each other. There are categories for the largest tomato by weight, the most colourful, the most tomatoes on a vine and the funniest shape. There’s a tasting competition, too — different varieties of heirloom tomatoes are lined up and served as samples. With well over a dozen different types to choose from, the variety of colours and flavours is truly impressive. The first time I sampled all of them, I was blown away by the difference in taste. Some were sweet, some were juicy, some were savoury. One memorable tomato was downright meaty in its taste and texture. Not a single one was a bland red tomato like the stereotype.
The variety on display was fun, yes, but it was also eye-opening. These were, for the most part, heirloom varieties — tomato strains that are from older genetic stock and are genetically diverse as a result. But heirloom varieties are losing ground to the generic red hothouse and cherry tomatoes on grocery store shelves, largely because industrial agriculture works best with a single type of plant. It’s this narrowing of diversity that I’m reminded of when we celebrate the Tomato Festival at the market. Global supply chains and multinational seed corporations have a way of flattening agriculture and promoting sameness. It’s better for their bottom lines, but our food and our gardens can — and should — be colourful, diverse and abundant.
Food diversity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, which is why the Farmers’ Market doesn’t stop at the Tomato Festival. This festival is part of a series of mini-celebrations that advocate for diversity in the vegetables we eat. You may encounter someone at the Tomato Festival encouraging you to save your tomato seeds. That’s because every year in early March, as the snow melts and thoughts turn to the garden, the market hosts Seedy Saturday — an opportunity for organizations like the Kamloops Food Policy Council to dust off their seed library and for local farmers to showcase their own seed varieties. Seedy Saturday is a chance for gardeners, farmers, and supporters of local food to come together and celebrate seed diversity – and have fun, too.
