Sand to Dust: The Bloody Tomatoes

The remote Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region is not only a steady oil, coal and gas provider, powering China's economic development, it also gives the nation's people, and even people around the world, good things to eat. There are juicy, sweet Turpan grapes and Hami melons, yet Xinjiang is most famed for its ripe, red tomatoes. Officials in Xinjiang realized very early that a resource dependent economy such as fossil fuels is ultimately not sustainable so they also took advantage of Xinjiang's natural conditions, and have cultivated the tomato trade, or what they call the "Red Industry." (Yu Tianyu, China Daily, 2009-01-12)

I can never imagine most of the tomato paste for catch-up in the State of Oklahoma comes from Xinjiang. However, it is not hard to understand the 30-42 North latitude is near perfect region for growing tomatoes, while Xinjiang has adequate sunlight and a temperature range that produces large tomatoes.

However, when I traveled in Xinjiang last summer, I missed the close encounters with tomato plants. Not yet the harvest season, and no sign of tomato trucks on the road. I was one month too early for Xinjiang's tomato harvest and too close to the uprising by Uyghur in Urumqi just couple week ago. The group I traveled with had to cancel the train travel and stayed with the main attractions for safety consideration. The next big news came from this autonomous region was in March 2014 that a mass knife attack at a train station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming that left 33 dead and 130 were injured. Members of a separatist group from Xinjiang, in northwest China, are believed to have carried out the assault,

Before I ended my trip in China, I watched the amazing Urumqi International Folk Dance Festival on TV; visited many water towns on East of China and ate even more watermelon. I could not believe the amount of sand and dust on me. The next time I learned something else about tomato is from the science news, researchers had found a fossilized 52.2 million-year-old tomatillo in Argentina, making it the earliest fruit from the tomato family ever found.