Rick's Notebook

Profile of the author
Monthly tirades
Archive of weekly columns

In Search Of The Elusive Wild Tomato

A few nights ago I was dining at a Persian restaurant outside of Philadelphia. You wouldn't expect to find such an exotic eatery on a suburban highway strip with traffic rushing in both directions, but there it was all the same. I was feasting on chicken kebab with rice -- I can't remember what it was called in Persian, but the name sounded appropriately exotic and sumptuous and reminiscent of some tale from the Arabian Nights about a merchant with three sons who discover wondrous cities of  gold, silver and brass. 

Anyway, I was enjoying my kebabs with gusto, consuming the full contents of two skewers while my fiancée Anne D. nibbled on her grilled salmon. Then I noticed the grilled tomato sitting in my plate, almost a culinary afterthought, a supporting player, a kind of garnish. I decided to eat it anyway. I sliced the tomato in half and nearly swooned as the plump warm tomato-flesh made contact with my expectant taste-buds. I remembered such tomatoes fondly from my boyhood, when my father would skewer them along with peppers and onions and cubes of lamb during his annual shish-kebab cookouts. I had forgotten how flavorsome and sensuous they are, those grilled tomatoes -- how different from the firm and virtuous raw tomatoes that we routinely consume with our salads and cheeseburgers. A grilled tomato is to a raw tomato as Sophia Loren is to Julia Roberts.

I began to wonder how a New-World vegetable like the tomato (all right, I know it's technically a fruit, but it EATS like a vegetable) ever found its way to Persia. Did shipments travel through Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Armenia before arriving in Iran on the backs of camels? And if the tomato is a native of the New World, how is it that we Americanos never glimpse them in the wild? I've never seen tomatoes growing like raspberries along rustic fences, have you? For that matter -- and this was beginning to disturb me -- I couldn't think of a SINGLE VEGETABLE that I've ever seen growing au naturel, free from the overbearing influence of human cultivation. 

Where are the wild vegetables, I ask you? Where are the native cabbage-fields, the luxuriant growths of untamed carrots and unfettered eggplants? How is it that we can find thirteen different varieties of squash in the supermarket without ever spying a single zucchini on the hiking trail? We know that radishes and artichokes are cultivated on farms, but they had to come from SOMEPLACE originally, didn't they? Where on earth did the ancient farmers find CAULIFLOWER?

But let's return to tomatoes. It's hard to imagine how Italians ever cooked without them, but the fact is that no tomato had ever reached the Old World until Columbus discovered our infinitely amusing hemisphere. Somewhere, at some point in history, some agriculturally-minded New-World yeoman had to stumble across a wild tomato and deem it worthy of cultivating. So where are those primeval tomatoes now? I've never seen them in my native New Jersey or in my sundry travels through the States. Have they gone extinct in the wild, like California Condors? Were all the native tomatoes rooted up and transplanted to farmers' fields? Or did some prehistoric Edison sit down and INVENT them? I need to know the lineage of our food.

Stumped, I consulted my home library and dug up an impressive old book called simply 'Food,' by the felicitously named Waverly Root. Not only is it the best encyclopedia of edibles I've ever seen... it also happens to be one of the most consistently readable and fascinating reference books ever written. I looked up 'Tomato' and found a six-page article on the subject. According to the venerable Mr. Root, we've traced the origins of the tomato back to 'the lower Andes, in an area covering parts of what are today Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.' Apparently the pre-Columbian tomato pioneers also cultivated maize, beans, potatoes and squash. (They preferred to gather tomatoes directly off the wild vines, like berries.)

So there we have it: if we want to see tomatoes and other familiar American vegetables in the wild, we'll have to sign up for a trek through the Andes. Who knows -- maybe the National Geographic Society offers a three-week safari through the wild vegetable regions of South America. Of course I'm assuming, without any basis in reality, that a dedicated vegetable tourist could still encounter the joyous spectacle of wild tomatoes growing in profusion against an Andean landscape. But we might be sorely disappointed: by now, vegetable poachers have probably sold off the last remnants of their native crop to profit from the lucrative international tomato sauce trade.

Cynic's Pick of the Week
Tom Green, the MTV class clown and current Mr. Drew Barrymore, has pushed pop-culture tastelessness to new lows in his new film (I won't name it here -- you can find it for yourself), which features Tom licking the protruding shin-bone of a skateboarder who just suffered a compound fracture. That's entertainment!

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. If you'd like this column to appear regularly in  your own site or publication, write to UPBEATmag@aol.com.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

site design by: