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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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.