The difficult balance between sweetness and tartness
He took a tomato off the stalk and handed it to us. It was still slightly green but it was very sweet. The tomato we could eat at the time of the interview had about 10 degrees sugar content, but when fully ripened it would reach 14 degrees. That’s about as sweet as a strawberry.
”But…” added Tatsuya Miyazawa of Miyazawa Farm, ”if you make it that sweet, it’s too ripe and the texture is spoiled. Besides that, it wouldn’t taste like a tomato anymore. It’s not as if sweeter the better. The balance between sweetness and tartness is difficult.” In addition, there are personal preferences. ”Some like tomatoes that are partially green and sour, some like it firm, and some like it fully ripened. It’s really difficult.”
Regular tomatoes and fruit tomatoes are actually the same?
When we visited corn farms and learned young corn and normal corn were actually the same species, the difference being when they were harvested, we were surprised. In the case of fruit tomatoes and regular tomatoes, it’s the same story. They come from the same seeds but will grow into a fruit tomato or a regular tomato depending on the way they are grown. ”It’s the same thing as Nakata-san becoming a soccer player. You could have become a baseball player too. The species is the same, only the environment and how its grown make the difference. ” But the story doesn’t end there.
Miyazawa says he is ”growing olympic athletes.” He grows tomatoes by hydroponic cultivation. With that method, many bunches can be formed, but he allows only up to the third tier. As the tomatoes grow drawing fertilizer and water from the root, the more you grow, the slower the growth and the more susceptible to disease. Therefore, he only selects the best tomatoes that grow up to the third tier. That’s why it’s an Olympic athlete.
All responsibility falls upon yourself
Miyazawa quit working in an office and started farming 6 years ago. He says the biggest difference is that everything is your responsibility. So the ”weight of each task is different” he says. Fruit tomatoes are a very temperature-sensitive crop, and in the 2011 earthquake, a failure with the temperature control system of the greenhouse killed the entire tomato crop. That severely affected his income. Everything like that falls back on him entirely. But if he builds a good reputation from his customers, that becomes his own reputation. With present day agriculture, there is a direct involvement with people. He said that is what he finds appealing.
