Recently I’ve been buying a few cookbooks from the thrift shop. Saves money over getting the new ones, saves second-hand goods from being tossed, and does the job I need in finding recipe ideas.
One of the cookbooks I got is a cookbook on pasta sauces. I’ve been holding off on making pasta until I could portion the servings properly, and I recently just got a portioning tool to help me with that. However, when I wanted to try a recipe from the book, I found surprisingly that the recipes called for fresh tomatoes.
Now, the cookbook is by no means new, seeing how the publication date is 1987. From what I’ve heard, canned tomatoes are actually preferred over fresh, though I can’t recall the reasoning as to why. I was curious about whether culinary knowledge has evolved since the publication of this book where common practice has changed to prefer canned tomatoes over fresh, or if the differences I’ve heard about are unfounded or incorrect.
On top of that, I was curious about other aspects. Would making pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes (namely Roma tomatoes) be cheaper than using canned? Also, since I’m trying to be more environmentally conscious, would canned tomatoes have a higher carbon footprint than fresh, or would the differences be negligible?
Thanks in advance! I likely won’t be able to respond to comments right away, but I do appreciate any and all help.
For quality? Tomato paste and sauce- the canned stuff, not the jars (prego, or whatever their other brand is.)
There’s a few reasons for it.
Also, generally speaking, canned tomatoes are going to have better flavor than store-bought-fresh.
The reason for this is because the canners are next door to the farms, so they let the tomatoes ripen on the vine and pick them when they’re supposed to, where as fresh tomatoes, they harvest them when they’re still horribly green so they don’t go bad while they ship them from Mexico. (Yes, this includes the “on the vine” things where they leave some vine. That does absolutely nothing once it’s cut.)
As for carbon footprint, it depends where you get your tomatoes from, more than how you get them- if they’re a local farmer, they’ll have a much lower impact than where your supermarket typically gets them (Mexico,)
If you’re growing your own…. That’s best in all cases (but making a sauce out of tomatoes takes a lot of time.)
Local farmers often have a larger energy footprint. If they have to grow in a greenhouse with heat and artificial light as many northern climate must do you are lost. A semi-truck full of tomatoes is per tomato not using much energy despite long distances, while a farm truck with a few tomatoes in it from farm to market uses a lot more energy per tomato.
I don’t know how to do a full life cycle analysis on this, but it is sorely needed.
There’s is a LOT of “it depends” here. on both sides of the equation.
For shipping up from mexico (or wherever. California can be just as far,) isn’t just a matter of a semi truck hauling it up. If the produce comes by rail (which it might,) that’s pretty efficient. But, the caveat here is when you’re shipping produce, you’re also storing it.
It’s usually refrigerated to reduce spoilage and other things. Then there’s the packaging (all of which needs to be shipped, too. To the farm and the processing plants.) There’s the question of how quickly it’s brought to market, and how much time it spends bouncing around the country through distribution centers.
For greenhouses it depends on the technologies being used in the greenhouse. On one hand, greenhouses using natural gas to heat, using horribly inefficient incandescent or whatever lights… yeah. That’s going to be awful.
but you can also have carbon neutral (or indeed, negative,) Greenhouses. (forexample). LED lighting at the optimal frequency, geothermal heat pumps… and then for comparison, my back-yard greenhouse has about three times the crop-size that a similar traditionally-planted plot would have- and I can easily take that up to five or six times, but it gets cramped to work in, which means you also need consider how productive that greenhouse is compared to how productive the open-field farm is.
The best you can do is look at individual farms and what their carbon footprint is, and then the footprint of their shipping infrastructure as well. But generally speaking, local growers are going to be lower carbon than international growers. even just storing those apples year-round (in a degree-above-freezing cooling houses) is ridiculously carbon-expensive
I would suggest, for anyone that wants “the best” and environmentally friendly, look for local crop sharing programs. Most of those farmers are environmentally conscious. (and community conscious,). and don’t be shy asking for a tour or something. they can be a bit of a mystery-box experience, but usually they have their staple crops (right now it’s apples and pumpkins/squashes).