Why tomatoes are the most poetic food
Okay, hear me out. I think that tomatoes get a bad rap and it isn’t their fault. They have the honor of being the star ingredients of some very popular dishes: pizza and quite a few pastas need tomatoes for their sauce, most salsas have a tomato base, ketchup is a beloved topping, tomato soup is a comforting and nostalgic meal, for many and sliced or chopped tomatoes make for a nice burst of flavor on a burger or in a wrap. However, when I asked people in my own life how they felt about tomatoes, most of them had a mixed answer. Most admitted they were perfectly happy to see a tomato as an ingredient in a much larger dish, but few would choose to eat one on its own. A couple of my friends even expressed outright disgust at the idea of eating a raw tomato, using language reminiscent of something alien and obscene.
Everyone is entitled to their own personal opinion of tomatoes; however, they must be content with living a life in which they are wrong. I make salads that are more cherry tomato than greens, cook a large batch of homemade tomato soup almost weekly, and regularly eat heirloom tomatoes the size of my hand in single sittings. This article is, however, not an attempt to convert anyone into a raw tomato lover (though that would be ideal). My goal instead is for people to acknowledge their poetic beauty, even if they don’t appreciate their taste. Tomatoes, to me, are about love, repetition and obsession.
Even amongst other fruits frequently used in poems, the humble tomato remains the star. The pomegranate, though beautiful, has been painfully overdone. How easy it is to compare the hard work of a pomegranate to the defiling of another, of the occasional violence of love. An orange may be playful, a bright burst of color in a dreary winter poem, but tomatoes can do more with a mellower attitude. They don’t mimic the flashy, almost excessively sweet nature of the strawberry and they don’t request from us the labor that a stone fruit or melon does. They exist as they are, to be eaten and shared. To make something out of the simplicity of a tomato is hard work, yet poets do it over and over again, in a way that, to me, never gets old.
Tomatoes with their soft and fragile flesh mimic the reality of the love we have for one another. Easily bruised and worth the wait. Eating one is a vulnerable and intimate experience. Teeth break the flesh of the fruit knowing they are putting their body and clothes in danger of permanent stains. Tomatoes open messily, unshy. We wait through the slow, overbearing heat of summer for this, a bright red reward so ripe it’s about to burst. Just this fall my mother allowed a tomato to rot on the vine of the plant we potted together in June, waiting for me to come home to eat it. She is one of those aforementioned “raw tomato haters,” but recognized their importance to me, willing to risk letting it go to waste rather than disappoint, an act of irrational tomato love that I think is a poem in itself.