MSNBC - Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes

If you insist on eating fruit and vegetables out of season, then your taste buds deserve what they get

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Gersh Kuntzman

Newsweek

Updated: 12:38 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2004

Dec. 13 - There is no tomato crisis. Yes, you may have heard news stories recently about how the hurricanes in Florida and the torrential fall rains in California decimated the tomato crop, causing shortages and massive price increases. You may have even heard that many fast-food chains told their customers that if they wanted a slice of red on their burger, they needed to specifically ask for it.

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You may have even been to your local Mexican restaurant and been charged— horrors!—for the salsa that accompanied the chips. And you may have been driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike and stopped at a Roy Rogers in Sturbridge only to find that tomatoes had been taking off the "Fixin’s Bar." If one or several of these tragedies have befallen you, you might have been inclined to think, hmm, there must be some kind of a tomato crisis going on.

But there is no tomato crisis. The tomato crisis is you. You want to know what your problem is? You expect to have tomatoes all year round. In fact, you’ve become so accustomed to having a slice of tomato on your burger whether it’s mid-August or mid-January that restaurants have become slaves to your impossible demand, unable to remove tomatoes from the menu even if Mother Nature issues a series of decrees named Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. You live by the motto, "Have it your way," not "You Can’t Always Get What You Want."

And because the restaurants must not only have tomatoes all year round, but tomatoes that taste the same all year round, tomato farmers aren’t really growing tomatoes anymore, but hard green orbs that are picked a month early, kept in coolers for a few weeks, and "ripened" with ethylene gas. And no matter how bad these "slicing tomatoes" are, you keep buying them, further emboldening the mass producers of lousy tomatoes to keep producing lousy tomatoes en masse.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you live your life the way I do. I’m obsessed with eating seasonal produce in its actual season. As such, I simply don’t eat tomatoes between the months of October and May. And don’t get me started on peaches. I eat peaches one, or perhaps two, months per year. And during those 30 or 60 days, my life is a disgusting orgy of peach-eating, with bits of fuzz flying all over the kitchen and juice all over my shirt. And when it’s over, it takes 10 months before I’ll even look at a peach. So don’t be me. I’m nuts. But all I am asking is that when life throws you lemons, you don’t try to make gazpacho.

I became haunted with the obviously quaint notion that fruits and vegetables are seasonal products a decade ago, when I met Lucky Lee, a woman who has spent her entire life ensuring that you get to not only eat a tomato all year round, but that the tomato will be an actual tomato, not a hard green ethylene gas ball.

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Page 2: Dissatisfaction with Tomatoes

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