Food
What Are Heirloom Tomatoes, Anyway?
Each spring Spencer Huey brings thousands of homegrown heirloom tomatoes to a parking lot in Berkeley, California, for a one-day community sale. “I grow 50 varieties of tomatoes and 2,500 plants,” says Huey, a cook at Chez Panisse and creator of the Tomato Club substack. “It’s a little crazy.”
Fortunately, there are plenty of enthusiasts who share his devotion. As temperatures rise, heirloom tomatoes—open-pollinated varieties grown from seeds that have been passed down for generations—headline backyard plots, farmstands, Michelin-starred kitchens, and beyond. For devotees, the juicy flavors, rainbow colors, and irregular shapes and sizes of heirloom tomatoes are worlds away from the blandly homogenous red armies sold in supermarkets.
But what are heirloom tomatoes, exactly? And how are they different from the ones your nearest grocery chain stocks all year long? Here’s everything you need to know.
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What are heirloom tomatoes?
Heirloom tomatoes are flavorful varieties grown from seeds that farmers have saved and handed down from farmer to farmer, usually for at least 50 years. “They’re created by a specific community or culture because they like the traits, the color, or the way the tomato tastes,” Huey says.
To be clear, the tomatoes themselves aren’t antiques. They’re called heirlooms because their seeds predate the grim march of industrial hybridization. In the 20th century, many farmers began crossing tomato varieties to create hybrids that looked uniform, resisted disease, and could withstand long-haul shipping to retailers miles away. Taste was less of a priority.
Meanwhile, “heirloom tomatoes are grown for flavor,” Huey says. Their generations-old seeds are open-pollinated—fertilized by insects, wind, and the like—rather than being manipulated by breeders.
The term heirloom isn’t regulated, though. A savvy marketer can use that word to sell any fruit or vegetable, regardless of whether its seeds were around during the Nixon administration.
Heirloom tomatoes versus ‘regular’ tomatoes
Most tomatoes you’ll find in the produce sections of grocery chains are hybrids. They tend to be uniformly red and evenly sized, with thick skins designed to withstand transit.
Heirloom tomatoes are more diverse. Some are the size of cherries or golf balls, while others are charmingly bulgy and weigh up to three pounds. Depending on the variety, they may taste intensely sweet, tangy, smoky, savory, or almost citrusy. Colors include scarlet, orange, green, yellow, blue, deep purple, or a combination; insiders describe the stripey ones as tomatoes with “shoulders.” In any case, expect heirloom tomatoes to have thin skins and juicy, flavorful interiors.
Are heirloom tomatoes genetically modified?
One reason why heirloom tomato varieties vary so much is that they’re not genetically modified. Their generations-old seeds haven’t been altered by human hands eager to sell more produce to far-flung shoppers year-round. Open-pollination preserves the plants’ distinctive family characteristics, so heirloom tomatoes taste like, well, tomatoes.