The Ugly Tomato has won its six year war for equal access to the nation’s produce bins. Death to the tasteless round red Florida tomato!
The Florida red round tomato is a placeholder on the plate. Consumers in the nation’s groceries are free—free at last!—to buy a tomato that tastes tomato.
We suspect the Ugly Tomato has certain people freaking out. No telling what happens, once citizens get used to the real thing. This could be a breakout moment for American culture.
Big changes. Like questioning whether tasteless suburban tract housing with no lot lines, no public spaces, no parks, no amenities beyond the “Club House”, should be zoned and permitted by right in farm fields where suddenly the perfectly round, red and tasteless tomato can no longer be profitably grown.
The black hats in this juicy story are farmers of round red tomato grown in places like South Florida’s Homestead and Naples who become production home developers as soon as the economics of their crop dip below what is required to carry the mortgage value on their property, lent by bankers who mark the value of the land to its speculative use as housing, not tomato fields.
Any way you look at it, bad crops make a few people rich and leave a tasteless feeling for the rest of us.
That is why, if you were walking next to a farmer and a banker in a field of perfectly round red tomatoes (past Mexican farm laborers bent over blue bins) you would begin to understand why the taste of the product has been irrelevant for so long that most American consumers can’t tell the difference.
We guess that tasteless, round red tomato growers are conservatives. We’d bet a hundred dollars on it.
In Miami-Dade, we just saw them the other day rant and rail at County Hall against government intrusion on their property rights. The day before, they were in Tallahassee ranting and railing for government to protect their perfectly tasteless, red round tomatoes from the tomato that tastes tomato.
Protecting the round red and tasteless sounds like what happens at Grover Norquist’s power breakfasts where wealthy campaign contributors plan how to sell the American people on the virtue of the free market while raking in as much cash as they can, for as long as they can rig markets their way until the public rebels.
We are just coming into one of those periods of rebellion, right now.
It will be the consequence of a serious economic downturn that has its roots in consumer doubt and fear, tied to individual choices by the millions to ride the housing markets up, like a roller coaster ride without a safety bar.
The Federal Reserve is printing money fast as it can. The diplomats are working one hundred hour weeks to push the price of oil down. There is good news: Ugly Tomato futures are soaring.
7 comments:
Ugly tomatoes taste like shit.
Long live the Homestead red round tomato growers!
Insightful article, anyone who can't taste the delicious ugly tomatoes has probably been using too much DDT to think str8 anymore.
round red tomatoes do taste ok-IF they are allowed to ripen on the plant.
However when picked hard and GREEN as is the current practice they are downright nasty.
Does anyone know what ugly ripes really area? They are disformed rounds. So, they are really red rounds, picked at the same time.
The Procacci family who is actually in the real estate business, not tomato farming.
Instead of dumping the disformed tomatoes, they just call them a catchy name and charge consumers more for them.
To me it is not a tomato, if it is not vine ripened. The ugly tomato is cute and has a wonderful favor... but if they pick it green and gas it.... it will be as just yukky as the rest.
"UglyRipe" is a registered brand name for the Santa Sweets heirloom beefsteak style tomato and is probably responsible for the coining of the term "ugly tomato". The variety's irregular appearance, which is contrary to the standard round tomatoes regularly produced by Florida tomato growers is why Santa Sweet company was denied their right to sell the tomatoes... the board that decided to ban the export are the competitors of the Santa Sweets.
The most common definition of what an heirloom tomato is, is that an heirloom tomato is any tomato variety that is not a hybrid and has been in cultivation for at least fifty years.
Those tomatoes are not hybrids. And they have not been grown to look pretty in the stores and they certainly don't look plastic or taste that way. They are the beefstake tomatoes we grew up with.
Shop local. Read Labels of Origin. Support LOCAL growers. We need to force the chain stores to purchase fresh produce when it is grown locally.
Ahh... I really miss the farmers markets of upstate New York, northeren Califonia, where you could get the other heirloom varieties. You can get the starting seedlings here in October at Three Sisters farms near the Fruit and Spice Park in Homestead. Or you could grow your own by saving the seeds from the Ugly Ripes you really like. That is the secret of heirlooms, they grow true to seed. They may or may be hybrids, however they are stable and very old hybrids that come "true to seed." Plant a seed from one the plastic tomatoes you buy in the supermarkets today and Lord knows what you might end up with, most likely an even more plastic and green tomato. And no if you let the tomatoes sold in the stores ripen on the vine, you will get a mushy, ripe plastic tomato. "Red Rounds" are modern hybrids that were bred to be uniform, easy to pack and ship green.
Those who are generational farmers are growing weary of the rantings of those who pretend to understand us or our industry or our personal investment strategies. I sense a bitterness that the writer regrets lacking the cleverness to market something along the lines of an ugly tomato or to have invested in farmland some years ago. Perhaps not everyone has the work ethic needed to succeed. The peice doesn't seem to be about tomatoes at all. It is simply one more hateful reminder that sitting at a computer ranting at others is far simpler than actually contributing to the economy or supplying food to those who choose not to grow their own. Stop ranting and try planting.
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