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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

THE WAY WE EAT NOW

Miracle Grow

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: December 26, 2004

Fruits and vegetables are made, not born. In the hands of plant breeders 
they evolve and take on new colors, shapes and tastes. Two of these 
innovators died last year. Oved Shifriss concentrated on vegetables. Ross 
Sanborn experimented with fruit. Both men, in search of more healthful and 
more delicious food, changed the way we eat. For the longest time, home 
gardeners who loved tomatoes had a tough row to hoe, wrestling with 
persnickety, disease-prone plants. Then, in 1949, along came the Big Boy, a 
hybrid developed by Oved Shifriss, a plant breeder and geneticist at W. 
Atlee Burpee. On manageable vines, the Big Boy produced large, fat, 
disease-resistant tomatoes that could weigh a pound or more.

''The Big Boy was the biggest single innovation we ever did,'' said George 
Ball, Burpee's chief executive. ''It was a quantum leap in performance that 
opened the door for amateur activity. Suddenly anybody -- mom, dad, the Boy 
Scout next door -- could garden with the tomato. For gardening, it was as 
innovative as the V-8 engine or the microchip.'' A half century later, the 
Big Boy still thrives. In the Burpee catalog, it comes first in the Tomato 
Hall of Fame sampler package, where it's described, simply, as ''the legend.''

Shifriss, the man behind the Big Boy, did more than tomatoes. At Burpee, in 
Doylestown, Pa., where he was director of vegetable research from 1942 to 
1950, he developed the first commercial hybrids of a dozen produce 
varieties, including cucumber, eggplant, muskmelon and watermelon. At 
Rutgers University, where he was a plant breeder and geneticist from 1958 
to 1984, Shifriss did pioneering research on plant genetics, particularly 
in squash. By isolating the B-gene, also known as the precocious yellow 
gene, from gourds, he developed an entire family of hybrid yellow squash 
that doesn't show the cosmetic defects typical of cucumber mosaic virus, a 
disfiguring patchwork of green splotches and stripes that made previous 
yellow squashes too ugly to sell. For growers around the world, this was a 
major breakthrough. He also developed the Jersey golden acorn squash, which 
had 40 percent more protein and three times the betacarotene of the 
green-skinned acorn squash.

After retiring, Shifriss continued his plant-breeding work on a Rutgers 
plot known as Hort Farm III. He was hard at work on a new squash variety 
that could rival corn, rice and potatoes as a world crop, a kind of Project 
X to rival the Big Boy. ''His work reached everybody who eats, one way or 
another,'' said Carolyn Male, author of ''100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the 
American Garden.'' Courtesy of Shifriss, a slew of improved vegetables 
became available to home gardeners and commercial growers alike.

Every plant breeder has a dream. For Ross Sanborn, a longtime farm adviser 
at the University of California, it was the perfect apricot. Sanborn spent 
decades developing a white apricot he called an Angelcot, a velvet-skinned, 
ovoid fruit with pale yellow skin and white, juicy, intensely sweet flesh.

The Angelcot became a cult fruit at specialty markets near Sanborn's farm 
in Brentwood, Calif., and briefly made an appearance in New York. Bill 
Yosses, the executive chef at Josephs Citarella, used them to make an 
apricot upside-down cake, which sold out whenever it appeared on the menu. 
''We've gotten so used to second-rate fruit that when you come across 
something perfect, it really stands out,'' Yosses said. ''These apricots 
had a texture that was resistant but soft, a beautiful acid-sugar balance 
and an intense apricot flavor. They were like little jewels.''

Sanborn came late to the apricot. He grew up in Pomona, Calif., in the 
middle of fruit country, and took to gardening as a child. At the 
University of California at Berkeley, he played football, and in 1944 he 
enlisted in the Navy. Within a few months Sanborn was storming the beaches 
at Normandy. After the war, he returned to Davis to earn a master's degree 
in pomology and signed on as a farm adviser with the cooperative extension 
service. Like a scientific evangelist, he had a mission to spread the news 
of the university's research to California's farmers.

In 1976, a friend serving as a farm adviser in Iran sent him a package of 
white-apricot seeds, as well as some seeds from Morocco. Sanborn planted 
them, and the apricots that resulted were a revelation. Sanborn then 
grafted the best plants onto trees at a nearby farm, and one thing led to 
another. In the 1980's, he bought a ranch in Brentwood to continue his 
research. Along with apricots, he grew a dozen varieties of cherries, 
hazelnuts, chestnuts, peaches, nectarines, grapes and what he described as 
''oddball'' figs. A cherry he helped develop, the Brooks, is now one of the 
leading early-growth sweet cherries produced in California. In 1996, the 
California Cherry Growers and Industries Foundation named him Cherry Man of 
the Year.

At the time of his death at 84, Sanborn was still tinkering with the 
Angelcot, trying to develop greater hardiness so it could ship across 
country without bruising and an eye-catching blush on the skin. He gave its 
various cultivars, all sold under the Angelcot brand name, fanciful names 
like Heavenly, Saintly and Pearly Gates. Sanborn set his sights very high. 
The Angelcot was intended to be divine, the fruit of the gods. He came very 
close.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/magazine/26FOOD.html