Tomato Time - It's Back Baby
The Italian Peninsula didn't have tomatoes until the 16th Century.
It is once again tomato time. Those luscious nightshades, carrying beautiful names like Black Krim, Amish Paste, Brandywine, Woodle Orange and Blondkopfchen, have matured, bursting off the vine, full of flavor. Now is the season for salsas rich in lycopene and Vitamin C. For tomato salads redolent with feta, basil, and balsamic. For sun-dried, stewed, roasted, crushed, grilled, or eaten like Denethor in Lord of the Rings, listening to a poor hobbit’s song while you send your son to his early death. For these next few short weeks tomatoes reach their full potential, not through various eldritch big agriculture food engineering processes, but because it’s hot enough and the tomatoes have been growing long enough.
I have already written about tomatoes for this site. I waxed rhapsodic about them in a way I’m sure made several people uncomfortable, tip-toeing right up to the line of appropriate. I won’t subject you again to my tomato odes bold enough to make Freud blush. This time, I want to talk about ripeness.
The Byrds – before I continue, yes I know I’m doing that thing writers do where they say what the main topic is and then immediately write about something else, so that when they come back to their main point again it seems like a surprise. As you are probably not a baby, I’ll still do that authorial trick, but I’ll let you know I’m doing it – have a song called “Turn! Turn! Turn!” If, like me, you only listened to Golden Oldies radio from birth until fifth grade that song has ingrained itself into your unconsciousness, emerging like a cicada every sixteen years to buzz unbidden around your head, make a lot of noise, and then return to its burrow, ready to repeat the cycle the next time it comes around. If this does not happen to you, follow this link to listen to the song. The chorus and first verse go a little something like this:
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
While The Byrds’ imagery gets a little too biblical for me, I agree with the sentiment of everything having its own time. Look at tomatoes for instance. Do I yearn for a time when, in the dead of winter, I can walk to the nearest greengrocer, select five of their most plump, their most rotund Solanum lycopersicum, tick them off my community benefit rations card, take them home and make a wonderful *horribly stereotypical Italian accent* pasta sauce. Yes, of course I pine for such a day. But in my heart of hearts I know this is a dangerous dream, poisoned sugar plums dancing in my head, not just because tomato technology has not progressed this far, but because it would destroy seasonality.
This brings us back – as I promised so long ago, aren’t you impressed – to the topic of ripeness. Seasons and ripeness both require waiting. One of the themes of this newsletter, when I’m not writing about the Earl of Sandwich or day drinking in airports, has been the importance of waiting. Ripeness encompasses more than just the act of waiting, however. It contains layers, like the Shrek, or an onion. Delayed versus instant gratification do not tell the whole story. Ripeness is about waiting for the right moment. Patience with a purpose. It is a consciousness action. It requires both skill and judgement. Knowing the signs of ripeness, when something has reached that critical moment, doesn’t come naturally. Too soon and the harvest sours, too late, and you get overripe, mealy, and mushy vittles. It takes multiple attempts, and many failures, to get right. Same for knowing how to take advantage of that ripeness. Pull too hard, and the fruit might burst, twist it in just the wrong way and the whole thing falls apart in your hand. Or maybe, you don’t pluck it this year, letting it burst, showering its seeds to the ground, so that next year’s harvest will double, triple in size. A true connoisseur of ripeness takes all of these things into account.
This is why I do not want year-round ripe tomatoes. The skill of waiting, of ripeness, will wither on the vine like so many fruits and vegetables. The sweetness of delayed gratification certainly plays a part. A sliced ripe tomato, with a light sprinkling of salt and pepper, does taste better after an eleven month wait. But there is more to it than that. As much as I want a Star Trek-esque world, where anything can be replicated with a touch of a button, that is not my utopia. I want a world free of want, where everyone has what they need to live, thrive, and survive, but I still want a world where ripeness has a role. A world of vibrancy, of color. Both are possible. This is not an either/or situation. Too often, I think, people’s perfect futures rely on the saving graces of technology, and not the abilities of people. It’s a mistake to think “engineers will save us.” The saving is up to us. To make use what we have now in ways that are equal, equitable, and evenhanded. A utopia that relies not on some distant technological leap, but on the people we have now, that cares and prepares for our needs and the needs of distant generations. That understands the rhythms of the Earth. Maybe a time will come when ripeness no longer needs to be understood, but that time is not now.
It seems as if I’ve strayed away from tomatoes. So be it. I hope I’ve made it clear that ripeness does not refer just to foodstuffs, but to political climates, and revolutions, and everything in between. If I haven’t succeeded in making it clear, well, that’s why I spelled it out in the above line. Subtext isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. To mangle The Byrds, and staid MFA advice, “A time to show and a time to tell.”
Here’s a funny video! I brought the feature back. Wow.