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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Unshapely tomatoes
  • Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 07:24:23 -0700

Believe it or don't; this is on today's NYT editorial page at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/opinion/23thurs3.html?oref=login

EDITORIAL

The Unshapely Tomato

Published: December 23, 2004

Perhaps it's time for the Florida Tomato Committee - the trade group that controls the sales and shipping of Florida tomatoes - to take a new name. It could call itself the Florida Round Red Tomato Committee. Or perhaps the Tasteless Winter Supermarket Tomato Committee. Then it would be perfectly justified in preventing, as it has, the shipment of the UglyRipe tomato variety - so called because its flesh is deeply ridged. Consumers have come to believe that vine-ripened UglyRipes, which were shipped under a special exemption, are tastier than round Florida tomatoes. The committee is even challenging the parentage of UglyRipes. If they are heirloom tomatoes, as their growers claim, they will be exempt from regulation.

There is a world of nonsense here. Ideally, consumers would accept the fact that a tomato is the most perfectly seasonal of garden fruits, and that a tomato shipped long distances - from Florida or anywhere else - will be a tomato developed mainly to look acceptable and taste acceptable at the end of its journey. But when it comes to tomatoes, acceptable is not good enough, not even in the dead of a Northeastern winter. They must taste wonderful. Better to do without, if they don't.

And when it comes to tomatoes, being round and red isn't good enough. Hundreds of traditional varieties exist in colors ranging from near-black to near-white. They come in an astonishing variety of shapes: long and cylindrical, pointed, lobed, and ridged. Some are striped, and some have fuzzy skins, like peaches'. Some are meant for canning, some for slicing, and some to be eaten while you're standing in the garden looking for tomato worms.

Yet Americans still believe that a veritable tomato is round and red. We have committees - honest, official committees backed by the rule of law - to enforce that belief. It is time for some heterodoxy in the official tomato world. The Florida Tomato Committee should reconsider its stand on UglyRipes. And American shoppers should begin planning their summer tomato patches now.





  • [Homestead] Unshapely tomatoes, Gene GeRue, 12/23/2004

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