Ode to the Tomato
My husband is a native of Chile, and we lived there for several years before moving to the United States. Like every Chilean I know, he is justifiably proud of Chilean agriculture, which produces some of the creamiest avocados, sweetest apples, and juiciest grapes I’ve had the pleasure of consuming.
During our years in Santiago, we would make weekly pilgrimages to La Vega, the labyrinthine central market, where one can wander among tables stacked to head-height with fresh produce.
Here in our new home, most of our vegetables come from a climate-controlled supermarket. For the most part, we’ve adjusted to that fact, but there is one food on which he refuses to compromise: the humble tomato. Determined to replicate the deep-red, flavorful tomatoes he left behind, he has taken to the painstaking cultivation of every seed he can rescue from the best specimens available to us here, planting them in tiny cups and tending to the shoots like an anxious nursemaid.
Recently, his efforts paid off, as five or six of the hardiest plants bloomed at once and then filled with fruit. Just as he’d been assuring me, they have been some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted, and were well worth the wait.
Another Chilean also famously showed his love for the tomato. Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda summed up his appreciation in his well-known Ode to the Tomato, translated here:
The roadway
is full of tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
the light
splits itself
in two
halves
of tomato,
runs
down the roads
as juice.
In December
it goes wild
the tomato,
invades
kitchens,
infiltrates lunches,
settles itself
quietly
on sideboards,
among glasses,
butter-dishes,
blue salt-shakers.
It has
its own light,
gentle authority.
Sadly we have to
murder it:
sinking,
the knife
in its living pulp,
it is a red
heart,
a fresh
sun,
deep,
inexhaustible,
filling the salads
of Chile,
is happily wedded
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate
oil
lets itself
pour,
essential
child of the olive,
over its half-open hemispheres,
the peppers
add
their fragrance,
salt its magnetism:
it’s a stylish
wedding,
parsley
lifts
little flags,
the potatoes
boil with vigour,
the roast
knocks
on the door
with its aroma,
it’s time!
come on!
and on to
the table, in the middle
of summer,
the tomato,
earth-star,
star
repeated
and fecund,
shows us
its convolutions,
its channels,
the famous fullness
and plenty
delivers up
without stone
without rind
without scales or spines
the gift
of its fiery color
and the whole of its freshness.
On your next visit to Chile, take some time to appreciate the gift of that gentle earth-star, the humble tomato, and the rest of the glorious fresh produce the country has on offer. And if you’re not as great a fan of the tomato as my husband or Pablo Neruda, not to fear – the country also produces some of the world’s best wine, the consumption of which is another excellent way to appreciate the fruits of local agriculture.