Tomatoes

Tomato prices are on a startling rise. Yesterday the average price for a single roma tomato surpassed the cost of three pounds of USDA ground beef. Today shoppers can purchase ten gallons of Arrowhead mountain drinking water and their checkout total will not equal even half the cost of the tomato on vine. By tomorrow it will be cheaper to stay the night in a hotel than to cook up mother’s spaghetti sauce recipe. Hysteria will hit local supermarkets across the states. This is our government’s worst fear.

The problem with the tomato is that new tomatoes won’t grow. “Refuse to grow,” is how one farmer puts it in a special news report. Then the farmer cries on camera and collects his tears and kneads them into the useless soil, thinking it might help, which it doesn’t. The President’s head interrupts primetime television to address the nation’s tomato shortage, but the people pay little attention to his words because he relies on tired phrases he’s used endlessly before during his first and second terms. “We shall overcome this dark trial and return to the light.”

Somehow we learn to live minus the tomato. At first our salads, with their garlic croutons and onions cut like hula hoops, look lonely without their cherry tomato companions, which once exploded so happily in our mouths, but the black olive takes its place and our tongues hardly notice anything wrong. The traditional pairing of ketchup and French fries is now substituted with mayonnaise. Most people agree it’s not bad once you give it a try.

One day the announcement is made: tomatoes are back, mysteriously growing again. A target date is quickly set for the fruit to return to the general public. That evening I drive past a field where a circle of people take turns stomping on what appear to be unripe tomatoes. My youngest daughter watches them and taps the window with her finger and asks me a question. It takes a minute for me to remember what all the fuss was about.