Volume 24: I Wasn't Surprised when September Began
the last you'll hear from me on the matter of tomatoes
When I arrived in France in late April it rained most days and the markets abounded with artichokes and asparagus. Patrons of bistros and bars sipped on red wine. Spring was self-evident. I had gone to France to unburden myself of New York. But I kept my job and I kept east coast hours and I kept the parts of myself which had, over the years, been shaped by the city. There are certain inexorable truths which we all, eventually, are forced to accept. That we cannot run from ourselves is one of them. That we cannot ignore the signs of the seasons, is another. These are the circumstances in which we are rooted, in ourselves, in place and in time. I left France when summer was just starting to take shape. It was early July, the cusp of tomato season.
The advent of tomato season every year is always wonderful. In New York, it lasts little more than six weeks from early July to late August. Tomatoes ripe in summer are uniquely delicious. They are big and sweet and juicy. They differ in color and size. There are at least a half dozen varieties you can pick up at the market in Union Square–beefsteak, heirloom, cherry, zebra–all with different use cases. They are the inspiration for an endless range of recipes. But it is perhaps what tomatoes have come to represent that has made us dependent on their annual return.
Good tomatoes are a reminder of what is lost when we erase seasonality from food. Not only do we lose so many of the properties that give certain produce their popularity in the first place. But we also lose our grasp on time and its passage. “We live in an era when the passage of time can seem so unmoored from the human experience of it,” Amanda Mull writes in a 2019 Atlantic essay on her relationship with this time of year. How we experience the seasons is profoundly linked to how we eat our way through them. This is made increasingly difficult, however, when certain produce becomes available to us all year long.
And it’s true, as Mull says, that there are “few crops that can ground you so firmly in a time and place, and on such a particular edge” as tomatoes. But there is a precarity to tomato season that is not to be overlooked. As with most of the foods we love, it’s easy to take for granted just how far they have traveled from their genesis to wind up at our markets and on our plates. In the case of tomatoes, they were colonized by the Spanish and brought back to continental Europe from their roots in South America in the early 1500s. And while they thrive in the sun-soaked Mediterranean climates of Italy and Greece, most of the tomatoes we eat–the ones we get in plastic shells in winter that are perfectly round and impossibly red–are grown in climate controlled greenhouses, picked before ripe, and shipped from India and China.
These genetically modified tomatoes are a far cry from those after which they’re replicated. They are designed for “disease resistance, firmness and thickness” but they “lack in genes influencing taste.” Sweet sweet summer tomatoes are so indisputably superior to their out of season counterparts, they serve to remind us that there are certain wonders of living that cannot be manufactured. Which is why it feels like “every late-summer tomato is a miracle.” And so how lucky are we that tomato season has endured? When so much of the food we eat has been stripped of its quality, its flavor, its ephemera, tomatoes are a symbol of what we’ve lost and what is still to be reclaimed.
I think that’s why tomato season seems to reverberate as much with a sense of grief as it does nostalgia. “Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the experience of having what you lost, of seeing what you missed seeing. It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored.” August was lovely. August passed slowly mostly from the cafe in my hometown and the wine bar where I work at night.
I lost August, I think in the cushions of the couch or maybe in the gravel on an evening run. I don’t want to talk about August. I don’t want to mourn its loss. I don’t want to say to you the things one says to a stranger like “I can’t believe it’s over” and “How time flies.” I don’t want to invite you to a coffee we’ll never attend and fill you in on the time that’s passed. I want to tell you that summer was gentle and that I love when the hydrangeas blossom and that I feel like a kid when I eat ice cream out of a cone. That I feel painfully, devastatingly, refreshingly nostalgic in summer. That everything rings with a beauty I thought I’d lost.
And so I don’t want to to tell you about that time when I was nine and I planted a garden which grew tomatoes and zucchini. Because I’m told that was ages ago. And then in late July, when I returned to my native New England after some time away, I found the garden that was mine had been laid over with bluestone. And then July passed and August passed and the heat broke on a Tuesday in early September. Tomatoes fell out of season on an afternoon when leaves fell from trees and the air was crisp with change. All around me, evidence of the way things end.
And so I wasn’t surprised when summer ended and I was suddenly consumed by a craving for cardamom and Pinot Noir. The sun has wrinkled the skin between my eyes. I feel so much older now than I was when summer began. I feel so much older now than I was in spring when artichokes and asparagus were in season. I left summer and time and youth at September’s door. The pang of tomato season made itself known. All I can do now is hope that which we come to lose eventually returns.
This essay was originally published in Produce Parties’ first print edition zine, Season 1: Tomatoes. You can find it in the company of some amazing essays and recipes on the same subject HERE. It has been edited for the season.
so beautiful sara
😭😭😭😭😭 bravo