Strange Fruit

In recent months and years, various sources have shed light on exotic citrus like baboon lemon (scroll a bit down the page), blood orange, buddha’s hand, clementine, pummelo, Satsuma, ugli fruit, and yuzu. Ingredients like curry leaf and kaffir lime leaf can lend a citrusy note to foods. Less-exotic key lime, kumquat, and Meyer lemon are also options.

Modern Love Apples

As far as fruit is concerned, tomatoes have a rather storied, colorful history. At first considered poisonous—like many of the tomato’s Solanum brethren, save the eggplant and potato—once folks in Italy, and eventually England and the United States, began eating tomatoes, many immediately assumed that what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger, and the tomato soon took on curative properties. Early on, the Pueblo believed that those who ate tomato seeds gained powers of divination. By the 1820s, according to writings by Thomas Jefferson—who sampled tomatoes in Paris—people had begun believing that tomatoes kept the blood pure during the hot summer (no idea what that means...). A handful of years later, tomatoes were also thought to help cure ailments like diarrhea, dyspepsia and cholera, with tomato pills even hitting the apothecary’s shelves. The Puritans shunned the famed love apple since they thought it was an aphrodisiac (see “Tomato Legends” for more fun tomato facts).

Today, science has shown that tomatoes, in fact, do have a positive impact on health, most notably due to their lycopene content. Actual levels of lycopene vary from cultivar to cultivar, and plant researchers have been actively working to breed tomatoes with high lycopene content for the last several years (see "Breeding for Color and Lycopene Content in Adapted Tomato Germplasm" and "A Better Tomato" for two examples). Since lycopene is a caroteniod, the color of the tomato—which includes yellow, orange, pink, purple and black, apart from the common red—directly relates to its lycopene content.

Oregon State University has even developed a truly purple tomato; other “purple” and “black” tomatoes tend to just have blotchy shades reminiscent of purple and black in them). Reportedly, the tomato will deliver healthful anthocyanins in addition to some lycopene. Plant breeders are reportedly still working on hybrid variations to boost its flavor. The eggplant-colored tomato traces its roots to South America.

As nutrition research continues to unearth health connections to specific components in our harvested bounty, plant breeders will take that information and run with it. Once these new tomatoes hit the market, I’ll be looking forward to my first purple pomodoro and, of course, purple ketchup. Maybe kids will even drink tomato juice if it’s purple.

Just don’t tell them that it’s good for them.

Stars Aligning for Sea-buckthorn

When a crop has so many different beneficial aspects—think healthful, profit potential and farm-friendly—science tends to find a way to come to terms with any troublesome spots. A case in point is the berries of the sea-buckthorn plant (Hippophae rhamnoides). The general health benefits of the berries have been known for years, and the plant has a long history in Northern Europe and Asia. The plants are valuable in part due to their ability to grow where other plants can’t (salt-, cold- and drought-tolerant). The crop is also increasingly attractive to North American growers (see a University of Guelph piece and an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada backgrounder for two Canadian examples, and I’ve heard of a couple of projects experimenting with the crop in the States). In addition to potential uses in foods and beverages, ingredients from the buckthorn berries currently find their way into a variety of cosmetics and products in the so-called “cosmeceuticals” category. The berries are reportedly highly acidic and astringent, so blends with other fruit would likely make sense for most markets, although I bet truer-to-flavor demand would also exist (in adult-oriented drinks, for instance).