What Is a Good Tomato? A Case of Valuing in Practice

What Is a Good Tomato? A Case of Valuing in Practice What Is a Good Tomato? A Case of Valuing in Practice

Abstract

As a contribution to the field of valuation studies this article lays out a number of lessons that follow from an exploratory inquiry into 'good tomatoes'. We held interviews with tomato experts (developers, growers, sellers, processors, professional cooks and so-called consumers) in the Netherlands and analysed the transcriptions carefully. Grouping our informants' concerns with tomatoes into clusters, we differentiate between five registers of valuing. These have to do with money, handling, historical time, what it is to be natural, and sensual appeal. There are tensions between and within these registers, that lead to clashes and compromises. Accordingly, valuing tomatoes does not fit into inclusive formal schemes. Neither is it simply a matter of making judgements. Our informants told us how they know whether a tomato is good, but also revealed what they do to make tomatoes good. Their valuing includes activities such as pruning tomato plants and preparing tomato dishes. But if such activities are meant to make tomatoes good, success is never guaranteed. This prompts us to import the notion of care. Care does not offer control, but involves sustained and respectful tinkering towards improvement. Which is not to say in the end the tomatoes our informants care for are good. In the end these tomatoes get eaten. And while eating performs tomatoes as 'good to eat', it also finishes them off. Valuing may lead on to destruction. An important lesson for valuation studies indeed.

This article starts from the question: 'What is a good tomato?' However, it is not our aim to provide you with a conclusive answer to that question. It would have been possible to try. We might have gathered the views of a variety of experts and added these together to create an overall judgement. These are the four (or the twenty-seven) criteria that tomatoes should meet in order for them to deserve the predicate 'good'. If that is the kind of lesson you are looking for, this article will disappoint you. But this does not mean that we are out to critique the activity of valuing tomatoes and to uncover what hides behind it-be it financial interests, political power, or the desire to stand out and distinguish oneself. Instead, we are curious about valuing itself: what kind of activity is this? What emerges in practices where the 'goodness' of figures such as 'tomatoes' is at stake? In short, by exploring what 'good tomatoes' might be, we hope to contribute to the theoretical repertoire of the young interdisciplinary field of valuation studies, where concerns with 'values' that were earlier dispersed are being drawn together.

Prominent among the topics addressed in valuation studies are the ways in which monetary value is established and tied up with qualifications of whatever it is that money can buy. But money and

What Is a Good Tomato?

markets are not the only contexts where valuing is a prominent activity. For instance, cultural sociologists are busy tackling how values are related to what they call taste; philosophers keep insisting on the relevance of normativity while separating this out into kinds; science and technology scholars wonder how the study of goods and bads in practice can best be added to the study of objects and subjects in practice; researchers of care analyse the pertinence of health, welfare and other goals locally cast as improvement; while in anthropological work embodied appreciations are being explored. Against the background of these varied literatures we sought to think through 'valuing' by engaging in an exploratory study of a telling case. For crafting a rich theoretical repertoire, or so we contend, does not work by laying out solid abstracting generalisations, but rather by adding together ever shifting cases and learning from their specificities. The case of 'good tomatoes' is neither exotic, nor politically hot. To us that was part of its attraction: mundane cases tend to offer a researcher the license to explore freely while despite, or maybe because of, their mundanity, they may generate surprising lessons.

As we wanted to explore what a 'good tomato' might be, we sought informants in the know. But who is an expert on 'good tomatoes'? In the Netherlands, where we did our research, there are many. The country is a hot spot for tomato breeding, growing, trading and processing, while tomatoes are also a popular ingredient of daily Dutch cuisine. With some effort, FH, who did the interviews, managed to talk with people from all these worlds: developers, growers, sellers, processors, professional cooks and so-called consumers (who talked about buying, preparing, as well as eating tomatoes). In total FH taped and fully transcribed thirteen interviews. That we call all interviewees 'experts' signals that we were not invested in differentiating between groups of people, those in the know, experts, and those without specialised insights, so called lay people. Instead, we wanted to explore different ways of valuing, relevant to different practices. We took our informants to be experts in relation to the practices that they were routinely involved in it, be it professionally or privately. An additional advantage of staging our informants as experts was that it allowed us, as researchers, to curiously analyse our materials without having to know better.

The aim of the interviews was to learn about valuing tomatoes in practice. Ideally, we would have wanted to do fieldwork and follow our informants in all their tomato related activities. This, however, wasn't easy to achieve in our practice. We had little time, wanted to know about diverse practices, and found that potential informants were not keen to be shadowed, either because this sounded intrusive to them, or because they did not want to negotiate it with their bosses. As our purposes were exploratory, interviewing proved a helpful enough proxy. We invited informants to talk as if they were their own ethnographers-or rather (as the object of conversation was not a tribe but a practice) their own praxiographers. Here the art is to persistently ask questions about the specificities of activities that informants tend to take for granted. This incites them to not get stuck in relating their opinions, but to take a fresh look at their own practices. Our informants were generous with their expertise and on average the interviews lasted for about an hour. Once we had the rich and heartfelt stories on printouts in front of us, it was tempting to write up the results in the form of 'tomato life worlds'. For that would have been a good humanist way to go, to describe 'worlds' with human beings in their centre. Different worlds, as the world of a tomato grower is not quite that of a tomato eater, while the trials and tribulations of sellers differ from those of seed developers. However, we had set out to study not groups of people, but practices of valuing. And as we kept foregrounding these, other ways to order our materials presented themselves.

A first one was to differentiate between various axes along which goods and bads get mapped. In making these axes we were, in a first instance, inspired by the differentiation that Boltanski and Thévenot made in the eighties between 'economies of worth'. This work moved