Did your tomatoes come in this year? Yes? A bountiful crop? That’s too bad, because wastewater from cooling the giant AI data centers being built all over the country has gotten into the national aquifer, and the flesh of tomatoes is particular adept at soaking up microplastics and neurotoxins. Best to let them rot on the vine this year or, better yet, dig a pit and bury them, just to be safe.
Kidding. None of the above is true — there is no such thing as a “national aquifer” —though at this point it feels like anything is possible, in the bad news department, after a summer of serial tornadoes, massive wildfires and nightmare glacier-melt flash floods blasting mountain towns. Plus wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine and probably a few places I’m forgetting.
Meanwhile the same ongoing opera buffa in Washington where paying attention to any specific jaw dropper — wait, he told a lie? — seems an act of raw naivete. I wouldn’t be surprised if the president declared a crazy trade war with our good friend Canada, slapping them with a 50% tariff they’d immediately slap back on us, then renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” in a fit of toddler pique that had people all over the world shaking their heads in a blend of amusement, pity and disgust.
Oh wait, that really happened.
Back to tomatoes. Records are spotty, but for the past five years it’s been a sorry sight at my place. Hard little green spheres of shame that never ripen. To make matters worse, it’s been a perpetual tomato-palooza over at my brother’s house. He would meet me for lunch with a grin and a shopping bag filled with ripe red beauties, any one of which would have made my season. I tried to convince myself that he merely stops at a farmer’s market and loads up, just to stick it to me the way only a little brother can. But I know his wife is tending the garden back home, so cannot suggest deception.
“What’s Japanese for ‘tomato shame’?” I asked. My sister-in-law is from Osaka.
“Tomato no haji,” he said.
I distracted myself by focusing on the Japanese word for tomato — tomato — which seems odd, since the fruit came to that country in the 1600s with Portuguese traders. So how did Japanese tomatoes end up tagged to an English loan word name? The short answer is: they didn’t. Both Japan and the United States borrowed the word from the same source. Tomatoes are thought to have originated in South America, probably Ecuador or Peru, then found their way to the future Mexico, where the Aztecs named them tomatl — kind of cool that, magically transported to Tenochtitlan in 1400 and hungry after a morning building pyramids, you could ask for a fresh tomato and have a reasonable expectation of getting one.
I hung my head in profound tomato no haji, accepted my brother’s gift, and vowed to do better.
And this year I did do better. How? I bought a fancy pH meter — my wife felt that, given the results, the soil must be poisoned — but could never make it work, so took it back. Maybe just the act of trying could, in some quantum observer effect way, have changed the tomato dynamic. Plus dosing the plants with Miracle Grow Plant Food.
Maybe because I had rotator cuff surgery July 22, so couldn’t really tend to the garden in any way for the next month. Taking me out of the equation might have helped. Plus, my brother gave me half a dozen of the cherry tomato plants that grow in his garden like weeds, and those came through, big time. Though, given the last time my tomatoes really took off was the first COVID summer of 2020, I’m open to the idea that tomatoes show up when you need them most.
We’ve been eating them like mad. Bright red circles of tomato on thick slices of Kaufman’s challah, slathered with butter. Cherry tomatoes tossed into salads by the handful — they can also be popped in the mouth, one at a time, like candy. My wife roasted tomatoes, with onions and peppers, into a sauce over tilapia.
And the joy of giving them away. My neighbor brought over a mason jar of homemade cream of red pepper soup,and a French bread, as an act of charity for the infirm. I returned the jar filled with cherry tomatoes.
And Friday I’m taking my brother out for his annual birthday lunch. But the real treat will be when I hand over, with a flourish, a small container of tomatoes, trying to ignore what I imagine will be the brimming shopping bag on the chair next to him.