A few weeks after Christmas this past winter, I began to crave a fresh tomato.  I was happy enough with the paste tomatoes that I had frozen the previous summer.  They were great for the soups and red sauces that we eat a lot of in the winter, but they didn’t quite satisfy my craving for a fresh tomato that could be chopped or sliced.

As the weeks passed, I began to look more carefully and seriously at the conventionally grown tomatoes at my local supermarket.  I knew better than to be fooled by the appearance of the Romas and the big round beefsteak-type tomatoes on the shelves.  Although they were red, they would never actually ripen.  No, they would remain tough and flavorless even if I gave them the opportunity to ripen on the counter.  However, there were some “vine-ripened” tomatoes that intrigued me.  They were a deep ripe red, they were soft and they even carried a faint scent that hinted of tomatoes.

Eventually I bought a bunch of these (I say a bunch because they were still connected by the remnants of a vine) and brought them into our home and our kitchen.  That evening I cut a couple of them up and served them with some rice and guacamole.  They weren’t too bad.  They weren’t anywhere near as good as a tomato out of our own garden (especially a perfectly ripe Nyagous Brown or Black From Tula), but I had to admit that they were an improvement on what the local grocery chain had been able to offer that time of year in the past.

Once I had satisfied my initial craving, I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish the last two, however. I have to admit that I had a nagging distrust of these tomatoes and I never did cut into those that remained.  So, they sat on the counter.  And sat.  And sat.

I can’t say for sure how long those tomatoes remained on the counter, but I’m sure that it was well over a month (let me interject here that if you were to try this experiment with a “real” ripe tomato, you would end up with an empty skin and a blackened stinking pool of rotten tomato flesh in just a couple of weeks).   In any case, during that time that those “tomatoes” sat on the counter, they got slightly more wrinkly, but never did break down as we would expect most vegetables to do.  I was somewhat unsettled by this but equally fascinated.  Had these things been irradiated?  Were they grown in some kind of formaldahyde solution?  Were they the result of a genetic engineered cross between a tomato and some other life form that doesn’t follow the natural laws of rot and decay?

After several weeks, I  finally decided to compost these tomato-like things but first I dissected them.  The insides looked as you would expect a tomato to look except for one thing, when I looked at the pulp I noticed that all of the seeds were germinating! Each seed had become an inch long baby plant trying to escape the confines of the fruit they were imprisoned in.  Yikes!!!!  I was horrified at this frankenfood that I had eaten and fed to my own children.

It’s a brave new world out there folks!  And nowhere is this truer than in our supermarkets.  Our family plan now is to fatten ourselves up on real, fresh tomatoes while we can.  That way, perhaps we can resist the temptations of such faux foods in the supermarket aisles come winter.