Tomato Travels – Part 4
By Kira Hamman
Barcelona, Spain
How many kinds tomatoes are available in your market?
Three? Five? Ten?
In the mercats of Barcelona, there are dozens of varieties. Big tomatoes. Small tomatoes. Medium tomatoes. Teeny tiny tomatoes. Pink tomatoes. Black tomatoes. Green tomatoes. Pleated tomatoes. Speckled tomatoes.
You get the idea. It’s a tomato lover’s paradise, truly.
Of course, Barcelona is basically in a desert, so how do they do this? The answer is with very careful cultivation. Tomato gardens share space with olive groves and vineyards in fertile valleys, brilliant patches of green in the otherwise rather brown landscape.
Tomato plants grow in thousands of terraces, built by hand of dry-fitted rock into the steep hillsides over the last who-knows-how-many years. Much like raised beds, terraces warm quickly and drain well, so tomatoes love them.
But fertile and well-built though the beds may be, no tomato (or human, for that matter) can survive long without water. And Barcelona does not have enough water. Indeed, how to provide sufficient drinking water is a subject of ongoing debate in Spain. This spring Catalonia found itself needing to import water for the first time in its history, and as the climate worldwide warms and dries such events promise to become only more frequent.
Roughly 70% of Spain’s water goes to agriculture. Ancient irrigation systems waste a lot of it, but back before we started pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at staggering rates this was not a problem. Now, however, one can’t help but wonder if it’s responsible to try to grow tomatoes in the desert. One can’t help but wonder how much longer it will even be possible to grow tomatoes there.
The polar ice cap is melting. Hurricanes and heat waves are becoming more and more deadly. Entire species are struggling to survive. But if none of that is enough to inspire a change, consider what will happen to Mediterranean culinary culture without tomatoes. It’s enough to make you go solar.
