Selling tomatoes in the Big Apple

The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) (MCT) - It's only noon on a recent Wednesday and Berks County, Pa., farmer Tim Stark can't get out of New York. "I've never seen such gridlock," he says, as a black Range Rover with New Jersey plates inches in front of him for the third time.

He's spent the morning selling a ton and a half of rainbow-colored heirloom tomatoes and chili peppers at the Greenmarket at Union Square in lower Manhattan, helping three employees pull flat after flat of vegetables and armloads of basil from the back of a 14-foot truck parked on the west side of the park. As usual, dozens of chefs or chef's assistants showed up, lists in hand. Many loaded boxes of his produce into double-parked taxis or handtrucks. Now his tomatoes and peppers are hours away from dishes in high-end restaurants such as the Four Seasons or Otto, Mario Batali's elegant pizzaria. Stark will be back for Saturday's market, too, when even more customers will swarm his stand.

With their unusual colors and shapes, the heirloom tomatoes Stark grows are famous for flavor. Ancestors of today's uniform, durable hybrids, heirlooms are too tender to be mass-marketed. At $4 a pint, or $6 a quart, Stark's heirlooms cost twice as much as everyday tomatoes, and about $1 more than heirloom tomatoes available at Lehigh Valley farmers markets.

Instead of selling closer to home, however, Stark drives 120 miles into New York twice a week, sometimes more. It's where he started, trading his desk as a management consultant in city government for a produce stand on a city sidewalk, and it's where his customers are.

Besides, he'd never move the same volume in Pennsylvania. The day before, he'd overseen a dozen farm hands picking and packing 100 varieties of tomatoes and the same number of peppers from 12 irrigated, chemical-free acres. It's a vast, delicate, manual operation, with enough drama to fill a book. In fact, he's written one.

Published in July by Broadway Books, "Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer" tells Stark's story of how his love for the old varieties of tomatoes grew out of control, from an innocent pastime to an obsession and a livelihood.

Four lanes of backed-up traffic stand between him and the Holland Tunnel. Reversing course to head up Sixth Avenue, he'll try for the Lincoln.

Last night, he'd come into the city early to deliver a few advance ingredients to the chef who will prepare a white tablecloth dinner for 100 that will unfold within days atop a rounded hill with a view of the tomato fields. An Outstanding in the Field feast, it's the quintessential celebration of local food for guests who converge from great distances to savor what the land beneath them provides. Before the guests arrive, however, the farm's long, steep, winding driveway needs serious pothole repair.

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"What is it with this traffic," says Stark again, 15 minutes later and only 15 blocks closer to the Lincoln Tunnel. He squeezes into the left lane and turns west. Only one tractor-trailer is between him and the tunnel's express access, then yes! Open road! He'll be home by mid-afternoon, and up on his tractor until dark.

"I need to start plowing to plant cover crops," he says of the clover, vetches and rye that feed the soil.

It's another September and Tim Stark, 46, is burned out. After two months of crunch time, long, long days with little sleep, he's almost sorry Tropical Storm Hanna didn't burst his tomatoes with too much rain and put an end, at least temporarily, to their incessant ripening.

A few days before, he'd taped a segment for PCN's "PA Books" that's scheduled to air Oct. 12. NPR's "All Things Considered" interviewed him; industry reviews have been favorable, local newspapers wrote him up and a pot luck dinner is scheduled at the Chester County Book Store in West Chester, Pa. Yet, it aggravates him that the New York Times hasn't called.

He doubts he even sold a single book today at the market. Usually, all he has to do is tell people to read the first two pages and they buy it. Today, he'd been too busy with the chefs. Keeping the artists happy, he calls it.

"I was always a writer. I want people to read my writing," says the English literature graduate of Princeton University and contributor to Gourmet magazine, the Washington Post and Conde Nast Traveler.

Twelve years ago, Stark found a pile of junk lumber on the sidewalk outside his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. He built growing racks for thousands of tomato seedlings, which, evicted by his landlord, found a home in his parents' garden in Greenwich Township, Pa.

When he took the first heirloom tomatoes to Manhattan, people didn't know what to make of their odd colors and shapes. Until they tasted them, and the rest is culinary history.

More than an account of how food gets from here to there, Stark's book "Heirloom" is a loving memoir of lessons learned from old-school farmers and an unconventional family. His father, Howard Stark, was an Allentown, Pa., attorney who defended the indefensible. His mother, Sharon Sheehe Stark, also a writer, encouraged his need to tell a story. His gardening grandfather indulged his young tomato lust.

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The book is also a portrait of a place and its people: James Weaver, the Mennonite farmer well-known to fans of the Bowers Chili Pepper Fest, and Mexicans who came to work in Pennsylvania's mushroom industry but who found sunnier jobs with Stark and his ever changing parade of "tomato people."

It's a culinary history of how the Greenmarkets set up in New York 30 years ago inspired new restaurants and chefs with their fresh, regional ingredients, which in turn built a stronger local food system in spite of the loss of farmland to growing urban sprawl.

After 13 years, Stark still can't afford to own a farm. All his land, except for the house in Kutztown, Pa., where he lives with his wife and their two daughters, is rented.

But most of all, his book is an examination of why Stark continues to do what he does: the springtime angst, the overworked summers, the 20,000 tomato plants all in need of weeding, staking or picking, and the death of it all in fall. The groundhogs, the deer, the droughts. Wee hour runs to New York on Route 78, the truck heavy with the scent of tomatoes named Vintage Wine, Isis Candy, Banana Legs and Purple Calabash.

As he does each year at this time, he's thinking of bagging the whole thing. "I'm at a crossroads," he says. "I gotta change." But next spring, he'll put even more seeds in the earth, and watch them grow. "The farmer has an attachment to the land, and out of that land comes a very tasty tomato," he says.

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© 2008, The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.)