I say tomato, but you don’t know what the f#@k that is

Dear Tomato Hater, 

Since even you have not been living under one of the rock-hard tomatoes you purchase, you will be aware that Woolies call themselves the “Fresh Food People”. And without any deliberate sense of irony, they continue to sell you and your kind more “gourmet” tomatoes in a day than these fleshy, seedy men throw at the annual “la tomatina” festival.

But the difference between those volatile I- (which you habitually pronounce as  ‘eye’) talians and you, apart from your superior interpretation of pizza, is that the modern forebears of ancient Roma can actually distinguish a tomato from a plastic frog.

I humbly predict that the next unripe, taut, green, chalky “gourmet” tomato you impose on innocent gustatory organs will turn up in one of your “signature salads”. Commonly found accompanying the admittedly evolving “Aussie (got the cheapest sausages you could) BBQ”, and proudly compiled by your always male, sometimes obese, never funny sausage-flipper in customary “kiss the chef” apron on his annual foray into the culinary landscape, your “Irish flag salad” draws indigenous knowledge from generations of your rabbit-food devouring forebears, as follows:

1.  Take 1 iceberg lettuce carefully germinating in the cooler for 5-6 weeks

2.  Cut into large random camel bite-size pieces, taking care to include the knob as an untouched, worm infested whole

3.  Take 2 Woolworths gourmet tomatoes from the refrigerator and cut into halves, or if time permits, quarters

4.  Dollop (verb) a dollop (noun) of processed Kraft (it’s a miracle nobody has died from you yet) Mayonnaise unevenly throughout.

5.  Toss (the salad). Serve with soft, flavourless white bread, now with added fibre for those mc-constipated, palette-less, peanut-allergic, ADHD, i-children.

“So simple, yet so tasteless”, describes you to a pickle.

But you are not the sauce of my discontent. Bad salad is my real nemesis, I admit. I am a tomato snob, I admit. By following recipe instruction number 3 you necessarily condemn yourself to having rotten tomatoes hurled at you and your compliant family and friends, bearing in mind that these would not be hyper-charged herbicided, pesticided, fungicided Woolies cardboard varieties which defy the laws of rotting produce. Do you not know that leaving a tomato in the fridge is the most uncivilised thing a human being can do, especially if you have taste buds? Leaving a tomato in the fridge is like leaving a Mexican at the border, made even worse by the fact that South Americans gave us the tomatoes that you shamefully re-package today. Yes, with that Dolmio grin on your face you personify numero uno stupido.

Don’t just ask me, ask famous chef-lebrities. To all those hard-tomato eaters, Jamie says “get puck(a)ed”. And Nigella concurs, although admittedly much of her fruit may be too big for your cooler. I know what you’re thinking: “Gordon Ramsay is a red-faced muppet”. Scientific evidence proves this conclusively, yes, but you’re less likely to see him freeze his crimson cojones in a Westinghouse, than you are to see an Italian Prime Minister popping a young cherry. Hell’s kitchen will sooner freeze over.

Before you accuse me of being pro-British or un-Australian (technically these sentiments are identical), I have my own cherry to pick with riper epicurean civilisations as well. I’m quite frankly a little sick of Tokyo restaurants in winter including powdered quarters as salad afterthoughts. Your ninja food has such “balanced natural flavours” and your geriatric farmers grow such brilliant summer tomatoes. So I beg of you, iron chef, don’t go changing my next wakame and cod sperm salad to try to please me – I rub you just the way you are.

Once upon a time, tomatoes were a sweet, soft, ripe, delicious, even reddish, summer fruit, or vegetable – it doesn’t matter, but these days I’m the one seeing red. This once precious joy of life is slowly dying as ordinary people like you, ordinary being the key word here, show extraordinary ignorance of the humble tomato. Thus, for collectively destroying one of the few great treasures we can pass onto the (admittedly few) generations who will survive catastrophic climate change (which, incidentally, will make growing heirloom varieties all the more difficult), along with this first gauntlet I feed into your anaesthetized palette, I hurl at your pouty scarlet, yet pimpled cheek a discounted 1kg bag of the very thing you have spent decades guarding against – rotten tomatoes. In the meantime, roll back under your nightshade, keep your tomatoes out of the fridge and yourself out of the kitchen. Kapish?

Mark