Uncle reminded me about something that’s been bothering me: Why is it that we have the technology to make a device small enough to fit in my pocket that is a phone, organizer, e-mail device, and camera; can successfully deploy a probe into space to collect material samples from a comet and recover said probe; can put a friggin’ man on the moon and return him home safely; but we still lack the technology to grow a decent fucking tomato year-round?
Just asking…
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
“In the end, no one will SELL you what you need,
You can’t BUY it from the shelf,
You’ve gotta GROW it from the seed.”
Chris Smither:”No Love Today”
Works a treat for tomatoes, too. Home grown organic. Beats the hell out of those plastic hypermarket forgazis. Discover your garden or plant them in a pot. Time to deal with that “Culture Of Complaint” thing, quit grousing and get a life. Gaia’s gasping, and diddums can’t consume a decent bloody tomato. It’s downright Un-American.
Actually we can grow them, the problem is shipping them. A market tomato is an unripe, green tomato reddened with ethylene; the unripe tomatoes are much harder, so they can be piled in crate and shipped in a truck without the ones on the bottom being crushed As far as I know, they’re ALL somewhat unripe, but vary in how unripe. Out of season tomatoes are shipped farther and therefore shipped when less ripe.
FuzzFlash:
I do grow my own tomatoes in my garden, during the summer, which it is currently not. And since I’m not fortunate enough to own a friggin’ greenhouse, off-season growing would be challenging at best.
But even home-grown tomatoes are problematic. You spend an entire growing season growing the plants, and then BAM! for three or four weeks your up to your EYEBALLS in fresh tomatoes, all of which must be canned or used more or less immediately.
Growing organically (which I try to do) is even more challenging. And then there are the squirrels. And the fungal diseases. Oy!
Bottom line, “just grow ‘em yourself” sounds like an easy answer on paper, but it’s highly impractical in practice.
EC:
Well, I know that, but that, too, sounds like the type of problem we ought to be able to solve with technology. Either by making a more shipping-hardy tomato that still actually tastes like something, or by allowing local growers in less-than-ideal climates to grow year-round, so you’re not needing to ship them so far.
But the bottom line is, I don’t care how it’s done (within reason). I ought to be able to go to the store when I need a tomato and buy a decent tomato.
I’m afraid the unavailability of good out of season tomatoes must be blamed on the free market. The technology certainly exists to grow them anywhere anytime, but people are apparently unwilling to buy them in sufficient quantities at the elevated prices created by the special growing methods.
Still another reason why unfettered free-market capitalism sucks.