About Small Tomatoes

What is 'Small Tomatoes'?

It is a food blog, stereotypically. Beyond the guise of peach rosemary sauce and handmade pasta, it’s a place to talk about food. Food as a source of energy for the human body. The human body as part of the food chain. The food chain as one of the most vital cycles necessary for all life. Small tomatoes is a commentary on how something very fundamental to all life has morphed into something that thrives on market drivers that often lack integrity.

(salad with heirloom plum tomatoes)

It’s going to the grocery store, and finding that apples exist year round, even though they have little taste and came from New Zealand. It’s the vicious cycle of people who try to lose weight and diet by eating fat-free yogurt. You can eat 2 cups of fat free yogurt, have a fully belly, and still feel unsatisfied. It’s having to drench your salad in creamy dressing to make it taste like anything, because the salad is simply not fresh. It’s nutrition-less and tasteless due to the fact that all its components were grown in California, refrigerated for two weeks, shipped across the United States, and sat in your supermarket for 5 days before you bought it. (Read this amazing excerpt about strawberries from "How to Pick a Peach" by Russ Parsons.) It’s the e.coli outbreak that repeatedly happens with bagged spinach and salad. How we foresake integrity in the name of ‘convenience’. It’s the salmonella outbreak that happened recently with mass produced eggs. It’s trying to find a sweetened beverage at the gas station that doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup in it. It’s going into the supermarket and trying to find the food you want without added preservatives, modified genes, or growth hormones.

(heirloom yellow tomato with mozzarella, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper)

But let’s face it, there are 6 billion mouths to feed across the world. The mentality now says ‘we must increase production’ to meet demand. It’s not that peculiar then, that we’ve decided to manufacture our food in the same way that we manufacture the year’s newest electronic gadget (before outsourcing of course... oh wait, no I’m sorry, we DO outsource our food production). It’s what we know, we think it’s a simple solution: Do whatever it takes to keep food firm enough for shipping, and then make as much as possible.

(goods from the Clark Park farmer's market in Philly)

Unfortunately, much of this translates into food that has very little taste, reduced nutrition, and a million added ingredients that you can’t pronounce. Somehow, the food industry Goliath has been lumbering around in the background, changing the shape of our food markets with very little attention or resistance from the people that it force feeds.

(quiche with local tomatoes, spinach, eggs, and goat cheese with a whole wheat spiced crust)

So, at a super simple level, small tomatoes is about buying food that’s appropriately sized. I hope to draw your attention to the difference between filling and satisfying. A smaller tomato (or rather, an appropriately sized tomato) will most likely have more flavor than an oversized tomato. On more complex level, small tomatoes is about making a small but significant difference in the world. Choosing to know about where your food came from can be a very powerful thing. It can raise the attention to others, and hopefully raise the quality standards for food far beyond your kitchen. And though it may seem like small potatoes to buy your weekly produce from the farmers’ market, at least you’re encouraging the farmer to sell her small tomatoes.