Cheater, Cheater, Tomato Eater

I have a confession to make…

Last year my family swore off store-bought tomatoes. The rule was established as follows: if we didn’t plant it, grow it, and pluck it, it would not enter the house. And we’ve remained unwaveringly loyal to our pact (my parents perhaps a bit overly so when they refused, last summer, to let these home-grown tomatoes leave the house either, even to travel just down the road to their daughter’s kitchen. It’s an emotional wound that has, apparently, not yet healed, although I’m working on it). But the point is, we’ve made our choice and stuck to it, and the beautiful heirloom reds, purples, and yellows produced at home have been well worth toughing it out. But then, last week, tragedy stuck.

We had spotted that first tomato weeks earlier, all giddily watching its progress, mentioning it to one another in passing with a cheerful, “Good morning, how are you?” always answered with “Good, did you see the tomato today? It’s getting bigger!” and watching as its hue shifted from green to a deep, luscious maroon. At family dinners we would discuss when we would pick it, debating the perfect color and size that we thought might be the tomato’s signal to us that it was ready. We do this with all of our vegetables, actually. The purple pepper, for instance, we collectively decided to pluck the day the purple seemed to be lightening, every so slightly, at its edges. My mother did the honors and grilled it for dinner, and though it did not taste worlds different from the other green peppers that supplemented our meal, there was an extra flavor to it; a subtle hint of something that could only be described as, “Well, it does taste a bit purple” (that bit of gastronomic descriptive genius came from me, I believe, my mouth full of vegetables. Eat your heart out, Saveur, what a description. Hire me, please?). So, when we had finally decided that the time had come, and my mother had snuck out to the garden the next morning, hoping to surprise my father and I with the tomato sitting proudly on the kitchen counter, she plucked it from the vine only to realize that it didn’t have the right heft in the palm that the perfect fruit should, and turning it in her hand, discovered the hole in the bottom and the wholly rotten interior.

We were crushed, to say the least, especially because it looks as though it could still be a week before there is even hope of a second harvest. The cherry tomatoes are chugging along, but offer little comfort in times like these. And that is what led me to my downfall, the fateful afternoon when I was left to my own devices at my boyfriend’s family home and told to make myself comfortable, and to make myself lunch too. The store-bought Romas on the counter were too much for me. They smiled at me, flashing their red skins. I’ll just touch one, I thought, and that will be enough to satisfy me.
                I think we all know how this story ends – a store-bought tomato sliced delicately over whole-wheat pasta tossed with olive oil and herbs (at least the herbs were real: from the garden behind the house). And even though I ate the whole thing, it wasn’t good – a mealy texture, a watery taste –, it meant nothing to me, and I was thinking of my garden tomatoes the whole time, I swear! And it’s not like I bought this fake tomato, and it was at someone else’s home, so that hardly even counts, right? It’s a mistake I’ll never make again, but I know I’ll pay for it dearly with extra garden watering shifts, long afternoons spent wrestling weeds into submission, and possibly even the dreaded late-night bug patrol. But I will do my penance diligently; I owe it to the tomatoes.