BYOT - Bring Your Own Tomato
When I was a kid, you only ate tomatoes and strawberries during the local season.
Strawberries were only available for two weeks in June, because they were poor travelers and the growing season here in Chester County was very short and unpredictable. Because of improved transportation,hybridization and maybe some irradiation, you can get strawberries as big as your fist any time of year.
Tomatoes were a different story. You could get them in the market all year long, but winter tomatoes were pale pink with the texture of frozen jello. They lacked the acid bite of a good, fresh Jersey or Brandywine, and most people just opted out of tomato eating until summer. Tomato cravings didn’t go away though, and my Dad and others would compete for having the first fresh tomato of the season, using water towers and slanted glass fashioned into makeshift greenhouses. Each family had a secret weapon like tea made from manure and seeds saved from early producers the year before. The first tomato would arrive, finish up ripening on the sunny window sill in the kitchen and then get divvied up to the entire appreciative family. Three weeks later, there would be so many tomatoes the kids in the neighborhood would be hurling them at each other in mock battles or using them as ‘tomato balls’, hitting them with zuchini bats. Good times.
The last couple of years, winter tomato quality improved dramatically and you could buy them ‘on the stem’ at any grocery and they were almost as good as local. But expensive. This morning I heard on the news that tomato prices skyrocketed overnight, up almost sixty percent, because of bad weather in Florida. When lunching out for a while, you might have to request a tomato on your hamburger or pay a premium. If you get one, relish it. If you don’t like tomatoes (I can’t imagine, but there are people who pick them off their food like they are dead fish and move them to the side where they can’t touch anything else) give your waitperson a heads up so they don’t end up wasted.
Has anyone been charged extra yet?
