Tomato Week

California's annual midwinter orange festival in San Bernardino has its queen. The State's annual lemon show has none. The suntanned girls of San Bernardino who hope and pray to be Queen of the Oranges, will not compete for Queen of the Lemons. But in East Texas last week a trim 17-year-old belle of Jacksonville did not hesitate to come forward and be crowned Queen of the Tomatoes. By proclamation of Governor Miriam ("Ma") Ferguson, last week was the first "National"' Tomato Week, sponsored by the East Texas and Jacksonville Chambers of Commerce, blessed by growers, shippers and canners in a dozen States.

By the thousands people poured into Jacksonville (pop.: 7,000), "tomato capital of Texas," to see Queen Billye Sue Hackney crowned. A parade two miles long, with 25 floats, took one hour to pass through its streets. Trumpets blared across the baseball field, pages and ushers bowed and scraped as the Queen, escorted by the Royal Court of the Tomato, stepped up on a platform, and Jacksonville's Mayor Acker slipped a crown of jewels over her head. Jacksonville danced and drank far into the night at the Queen's Ball, and next day 5,000 farmers went to a barbecue and baseball game.

The celebration was supposed to commemorate the centenary of the tomato as food, though no one knows for sure when New England farmers became brave enough to eat one. In the U. S. before 1800 witches were practically the only people who ate tomatoes, which everybody thought were poisonous. Indians in Mexico were found munching them as early as the 16th Century. The French prescribed them as a highly effective love potion. Thomas Jefferson had some on his Virginia farm in 1781, dared to use them in sauces and soups. But a woman born in Trenton, N. J. as late as 1833 reported that when as a child she ate a tomato, her parents rushed her to the doctor, certain she would die. Not until 1835 did the editor of the Maine Farmer report that tomatoes had been cultivated in Maine gardens "and should be found on every man's table."

In 1931 20,000,000 cases of whole tomatoes, paste, pulp, sauce and juice were produced in U. S. canneries, to say nothing of the countless millions of fresh tomatoes which grocers sold each day. Canning alone was a $33,000,000 industry. As a tomato State Texas is surpassed by 20 others (biggest canners: Maryland, Indiana,California).

More newsworthy than the canning of whole tomatoes, which was a full grown industry by 1911, is tomato juice and the tomato cocktail which, in five short years, has tickled the nation's palate and pocketbook with ever mounting success. Before 1928 tomato juice was used chiefly for invalids and babies who needed its vitamins. Packers did not produce enough to warrant keeping separate figures. The first recorded figure was 165,251 cases in 1929. In 1930 production soared to 1,316.299 cases. Last year as tomato juice took its place on nearly every restaurant menu in the land, output was estimated at 5,000.000 cases, worth $8,500.000. The rise in tomato juice sales has been the most spectacular of any food industry during the Depression. The man who put spiced tomato juice cocktail on the market was Ernest Byfield, Chicago's most famed hotelkeeper. From his father the late Joseph Byfield he inherited the Hotel Sherman Co. (Ambassador East, Ambassador West, the Sherman, the Fort Dearborn) and its subsidiary, College Inn Food Products Co., which the elder Byfield had started to can foods prepared by restaurant chefs. In 1927 while visiting John ("Yellow Cab") Hertz in Miami, Ernest Byfield liked the taste of a glass of tomato juice he was given. He immediately put his chefs at the Hotel Sherman to mixing tomato juice formulas. College Inn tomato juice cocktail appeared in the autumn of 1928. Prior to that there were at least three tomato juices on the market--two made by Indiana manufacturers, one by Welch. College Inn sold 60,000 cases the first season, chiefly by word of mouth, with little advertising.

Production of plain tomato juice began to soar even faster than cocktail production. In 1930 a record tomato juice pack (excluding cocktails) of 946,000 cases was sold out in eight months. Big canners like Libby, Heinz and Campbell had better equipment, distribution and financial backing than College Inn to sell juice to the masses. They can no cocktails and today four-fifths of the industry's production is unspiced juice. College Inn's product still is a quality drink, selling for 50% more than plain tomato juice. Output last year was 350,000 cases.

To American Can Co. goes much of the credit for converting what might have been a fad into a permanent national drink. It helped keep inferior grades off the market by demonstrating, even before 1929, that tomato juice must come only from the best tomatoes, could not be considered a mere byproduct. Today tomato juice canning is a highly specialized six-week business, running from August to October. Tomatoes are brought to the factory the day they are picked on the farm, usually no more than 75 miles away. The juice is forced under mechanical pressure through a fine screen to form a smooth liquid. The brew is poured into vats for heating, and if cocktails are to be made, spices are stirred in with paddles. Formulas for mixing, always secret, usually vary in different tomato localities. Midwest tomatoes are inclined to be acidic, eastern tomatoes smoother, blander, California tomatoes sweetest of all.

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