Abstract Thursday : : Tomatoes

Thanks to Ingeborg, for choosing the theme 'vegetables' for this week. I was going to write about tomatoes anyway. I tweaked a picture of tomatoes ripening on our vine only a little...By the end of this week's challenges I will have all the ingredients for a ratatouille.

There is a reason why almost everybody I know toils to grow their own tomatoes. The tomatoes available in most grocery stores have no flavor because they were bred that way. They are native to South America where they were eaten raw in cherry tomato size form by the Incas and Azteks. Columbus carried them back to the Old World where they soon became an important part of many cuisines.

After World War II, as transcontinental transportation in the U.S. improved ,a move began to "improve' tomatoes. At the University of California at Davis, tomato breeders went to work on developing a disease resistant tomato with more yield, that would ship a long way. Customers in grocery stores who couldn't taste the tomatoes before they bought them,  made their choices based on appearance and price.Today most commercially grown tomatoes are beautiful and cheap , but, as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for." 

We see truckload after truckload full of these tomatoes plying the highways every time we drive through California's agricultural Central Valley to Los Angeles.I can only imagine that even with their tough skins, the ones on the bottom must be sauce by the time they arrive  at their destination.

We bought most of our tomato plants from 'Harvest for the Hungry' where volunteers grow organic produce and deliver it to several local hunger programs. People were lining up at the plant sale at 8am to buy some of 130 varieties of master gardener developed tomato plants.  The discussions over which variety to buy were often heated and they were well on their way to being sold out by 10am.

We* are growing 'Cosmonaut Volkov', 'Paul Robson', Sungold' an exceptionally sweet orange cherry tomato that I eat like candy warm from the vine, and a couple of other varieties with names too quirky for me to remember. They were chosen so that they wouldn't all ripen at once, but we are already having caprese salad every night. And there is nothing better than a tomato sandwich on good bread with mayonnaise and basil for lunch.

*I use the term 'we' extremely loosely. I eat them. OilMan toils away making his own fertilizer from scratch, turning compost, raising and lowering umbrellas so they won't get sunburned, and placing boards under the ones that are so heavy they are resting on the soil (a gardener's term for 'dirt'). In fact he is spending his birthday, today happily digging in said substance. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OILMAN!