GREEN TOMATOES AND LOSS OF VALUES

Chances are that any Australian under forty has never tasted a real tomato.
The ‘tomatoes’ on sale today throughout Australia, and probably in many overseas countries are not real tomatoes. They are merely a marketing ploy to approximate what real tomatoes look like. That is where the similarity varies from the reality.

The tomatoes of my childhood, the real authentic tomatoes, had an exquisite flavour nothing like today’s fakes. It was not just one flavour, but a cacophony of different complementary but distinct piquancies. It was so nice it was often eaten like a fruit. You certainly wouldn’t even attempt to do that to today’s phoney substitutes. They don’t look like real tomatoes, they don’t taste like real tomatoes, and they have no aroma, which real tomatoes exuded.

Real tomatoes had three basic grades, green, for future use, firm, for salads (tomato salad with shallots, sea salt and drizzle of olive oil was a salad to die for); and softer tomatoes, or cooking tomatoes. These were merely firm tomatoes that had been stored for a while, and decided to grow old gracefully. They merely went softer, and prepared themselves for stuffing, or to make delicious sauces and other culinary deeds. You could buy cooking tomatoes, which would be wrapped in newspaper, and go into your string bag. Today’s ‘tomatoes’ have lost the genes to age gracefully. They get horrible sores and get thrown out. What a calamity to happen to one of our staple foods. Today’s ‘tomatoes’ are still grown, bought and consumed, like there is a mass societal amnesia on what tomatoes are all about –orgasmic flavour!

I suspect that some guys in black suits decided that profits would increase if tomatoes were grown more like cricket balls. No spoilage. ‘Tomatoes’ were a commodity and they should be able to get from the farm to the shops to you to your children, who in no way would be coaxed to eat such an abominable chemical commodity. Sometimes children have an innate sense of what is uneatable.
Real tomatoes, it seems, had a fatal flaw. They retained the ability to grow old gracefully, and like the prima Dona that they were, demanded to be treated with kit gloves. Genetic engineering removed that supercilious smile from their face, and instead of growing old gracefully, they kept up appearances for a few days, then dropped dead. You couldn’t buy green tomatoes, to store and use when they were soft to your liking. Who in today’s stuporous marketing clientele would buy a green tomato? Well they don’t exist anymore anyway, the gas chambers see to that.

Green tomatoes had balls! That knew exactly what they were about. They would slowly achieve a beautiful colouring, improve their taste, and if they weren’t used within a week or so, they would settle down to become a cooking tomato. No sweat, they just did it for us, for our health and our psychic well-being.

What other foods are being changed under our noses, for economic reasons? All genetically modified foods, labelled and unlabelled.

Want your children to start loving tomatoes? Growing tomatoes in a veggie garden is fun, but you can do better. There are many seed companies in Australia that sell organic heirloom tomato seeds. This is the real McCoy. Tomatoes that smell like tomatoes; tomatoes you and your children will love eating, tomatoes that still remember how to become cooking tomatoes. Their seeds will always regrow. Be the first on your block to start a revolution!
I’m not getting paid for this, it’s just a service I like to do for my readers. You can mail order these extraordinary seeds from a number of companies.

Jankala organic seed QV I just purchased some from them. Fast reliable, and no postage charges.

Eden Seeds QV is also a good site to check out.

The English site of Garden Organic, (formerly The Henry Doubleday Society) is good for an overview of organic gardening: QV

Kali Orexi!