Does anybody need tomatoes?
For most of you, that’s no. A hard no. You probably have a countertop full of them. Or your neighbor has set several boxes on your porch before ringing the doorbell and running away.
It’s not literally true that I would kill for a real, garden-grown tomato in February. But I would commit some lesser crime if there were a good tomato to be found then. Which there is not.
I eat several a day over the sink, trying to keep the great exploding mess from the wall and my shirt. Eating a tomato in that way is more like a carnivorous attack than an herbivorous snack. Sure, it’s a vegetable. But there is red splattered everywhere along with the guts of the tomato. It looks much as a lion tearing into a gazelle on the African plains would look. It’s not pretty.
Pam is doing what she can to use them, even though more come through the door every day. Tomatoes are a wonderfully versatile food. She is saucing, freezing, cooking, steaming, dicing, slicing, and throwing them against the wall. I made that last part up.
I thought of Tom Hanks soliloquy on the uses of shrimp in the movie Forrest Gump. If you can picture Pam standing in our kitchen: “Anyway, like I was saying, tomato is the fruit of the garden. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sautz it. There’s tomato-kabobs, tomato-creole, tomato-gumbo. Pan-fried, deep-fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple tomatoes, lemon tomatoes, coconut tomatoes, pepper tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato stew, tomato salad, tomato and potatoes, tomato burger, tomato sandwich. That. That’s about it.”
Thanks Pam. And my apologies to the script writer.
We are not great gardeners. If forced to live a self-sufficient life here on the prairie, we would have likely died the first harsh winter. Fortunately, I can grow corn and soybeans, forestalling us from penniless destitution.
We’re not great gardeners, but some of these things flourish despite our un-skill. Cucumbers and zucchini are in that class. If one does the minimal amount of care and tending, they thrive. I wish that were true of raising children. It is not. If you don’t water and prune your kid, you’re going to have an overgrown weed patch of a teenager.
The growth rate of zucchini is astounding. We’ve all experienced being out in the garden one day and noting a nice little three-inch zuke fruit. We make a mental note to harvest that tomorrow. Then we come back and in its place is a giant flesh and seeded vessel the size of a small nuclear warhead.
It’s kind of hush-hush. But the Department of Defense has researched the possibility of using zucchinis in warfare. “Bazukas” are considered a NextGen weapon. North Korea has already launched several over the Sea of Japan successfully. So, the U. S. is trying to play catsup. Er, I mean, catch up.
In an attempt to preserve refrigerator space for anything else, I am eating one or two cucumbers a day. I’m not sure how healthy that is, although I’ve noticed I have a slight green tint. If I can maintain this till St. Patrick’s Day, it’ll be helpful.
(Sometimes I worry that I might puke a cuke. But that would be a lame attempt at humor using alliteration. My editor would surely not approve, and you readers expect more sophistication than that. So, we will avoid consideration of puking cukes. Or zukes.)
Setting aside lowbrow attempts at vegetable-humor, it occurred to me that this wonderful abundance of things from the garden is a perfect metaphor for the abundance that surrounds me every day. It’s easy to forget that I live in a fortunate place and time of great bounty. While the wealth is not distributed evenly, most Americans are blessed to live in this country in 2023.
Most of us have not been unintentionally hungry for a day of our lives. We should never take that for granted. There is real hunger in the world.
What would it feel like to have hunger pangs in my gut?
It would be a type of pain, I guess. I don’t know. The small samples of hunger I’ve felt when I’ve been out on a tractor for 10 hours probably are not good indicators of the sensation of serious hunger.
Worse, what would it feel like if I knew my child was hungry and I couldn’t do anything to help?
I don’t know. That I don’t know should be a source of gratitude every day.
Daughter Abigail has spent recent years working in Central America as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations. In that position, she has worked with some of the extremely poor in Guatemala and Columbia. Even hearing from someone who sees what hunger looks like up close is disheartening.
Then we can turn on the news. In just the last few days, there’s been an earthquake and flooding in places where poverty makes people ill-equipped to deal with disaster. So, you know there is hunger on top of all that comes with such a crisis.
Perhaps we can’t spend hours each day reading and watching about suffering in other places. But taking a moment or two to be mindful of and pray for those real human beings in real suffering is a good thing. Each of us then can decide where we can help a little by giving a piece of our resources.
Those red orbs on my cupboard can lead to all these thoughts. Turns out tomatoes can be a great mental accelerant.
– Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.