Some things in life are sacred. The silence of a church, the smile of a child, and tomatoes. However, sacred things are often treated with less respect than we might like: a tour group comes into the church and makes loud comments about the iconography, the ice cream truck leaves just as a girl gets money for a popsicle, and people contentedly buy dry, pasty, mass-produced tomatoes.
There's nothing quite like the disappointment of buying a tomato, cutting it in half, and finding the insides to be white, mealy, and dry, massive air pockets squatting inside the fruit. Ten months out of the year I am aghast to find tomatoes like this for sale - Garrison Keillor said these sorts of tomatoes are "strip-mined in Texas," and I can't help but think of this as I dump them into sauces and slide slices into grilled cheese sandwiches. I try to overwhelm their flavor with red pepper flakes, strong cheese, and emotional numbness.
This is a lot of fuss for tomatoes, and I get it if you don't get it.
The problem is that most people think they dislike tomatoes, and this is because they haven't had a real tomato.
A real tomato is never white; a real tomato is a delicate thing because it is so juicy and its skin so thin. Real tomatoes come in pink, red, orange, yellow, purple, brown, and green. Real tomatoes glow, and you know when to pick them off the plant by the weight in your hand.
If a groundhog eats your tomatoes - and not only that, but eats your Paul Robesons - you decide it's about time to learn how to shoot a gun.
Heirloom tomatoes have served as the seed for my interest in agrobiodiversity; certainly, they're probably more nutritious than normal tomatoes, and they're keeping genetic material alive, but really, all I want is a tomato. A real tomato, one that wasn't strip-mined anywhere. One that tastes like late afternoon sun in August, one that tastes like standing in Jane's garden - the place where I fell in love with gardening - listening to Jane tell us about the Patriarchy; I want a tomato that tastes like eating in warm evenings under soft light, listening to crickets. I want tomatoes with flavor that is sweet and round and full, citrusy or with cherry notes.
Last Saturday I went to the Galway market, straight to the stall I'd found last September. They sell Real Tomatoes. And it is bliss.
If you don't believe me, I challenge you to a tomato tasting: cut up a variety of tomatoes, sprinkle on a tiny amount of salt, and eat them fresh. No oil. No cooking. You'll never look at a supermarket tomato the same way again.