Every summer there is a short window – wants August – when the products are excellent. The cherries are at their best, just like the peaches, plums and nectarines. The watermelon is sweet. The aubergines are shiny. The corn is unspoilt. And the tomatoes! The tomatoes are unparalleled. There is a reason why tomatoes are synonymous with the summer, staple of home gardens and farmers markets. Gigantic, honking beefjes and prospective Sungolds begging to be converted into salads and gazpachos, thrown with pasta and cut into sandwiches, or eaten raw by the fiste. Enjoy it while you can.
Come in the fall, the tomato season will be just as fast as it started. Yes, you can obtain Sllicable Red Bolls in almost every supermarket, at any time of the year, everywhere in the United States. But they are pale imitations of dripping Augustige heirlooms. Out of the season Tomato-Gented Bad, melic and fainting only tomatoes in name. They can be useful, and to be expected to fill in a Greek salad; They can bravely garnish a taco and add to a sandwich with grilled cheese. They at least contribute and wear a sense of virtue about a virtue of a meal. Taste? Not so much.
This year, of all years, it is worth surrendering to the premiums of the high tomato season. The bloodless tomatoes that wait for us in the fall are usually imported from Mexico, and as with so many other goods nowadays, they are now stuck in the middle of President Donald Trump’s trade war. This week the White House imposed 17 percent rates on Mexican tomatoes. In all likelihood, it means higher prices for tomatoes from supermarkets, Tim Richards, an agricultural economist at Arizona State University, told me. This will not make them better in terms of color, texture or taste – but it will cost them more.
Grumbling over grim winter tomatoes is one long -term national hobbyAnd at the same time their existence is a small miracle. You can eat a BLT in the snow or a Caprese salad for Valentine’s Day without difficulty. In August 1943, before Americans could get fresh tomatoes all year round, mayor of New York City Forello La Guardia encouraged housewives to scrape for the winter by preserving as many tomatoes as possible. “They are in the markets of your city and I want to see that every woman can be while they are for this low price,” he announced. They wouldn’t have to do it long. By the sixties: “Just about every supermarket and corner shop in America sold from October to June Florida Tomaten,” wrote the author William Alexander inside Ten tomatoes that have changed the world. They were visually perfect but begging for styrofoam, which in many ways is what they should be: durable, pest -resistant, long -term and cheap. Tomatoes are famous fragile and rot quickly, so they are often picked while they are still green and then gassed with ethylene. It becomes red and gives the appearance of maturity but not the corresponding taste. In recent years, the situation has been somewhat improved: instead of concentrating exclusively on appearance and sustainability, horticulturists have turned around their attention Unpleasant Maximization of the taste.
There is another reason why tomatoes have improved all year round: Mexico. “Most beautiful, really tasty tomatoes on the market are Mexican,” said Richards. This includes small varieties such as cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes and cocktail tomatoes, or, as he classified them, “those small snacking tomatoes in the plastic things.” Mexico manages to produce this steady stream of the whole year, beautiful tomatoes by growing them mainly in greenhouses, of which Richards said it is the best possible way to produce North American tomatoes by scale. Even in the winter, tomatoes can be left against the elements to mature on the vine, which helps improve the taste.
All this means that an America without easy access to imported Mexican tomatoes looks bleak. Like all Trump rates, the point is to burden Mexican tomatoes to help producers here in the US thirty years ago, 80 percent From the new tomatoes of the country were grown in America. Now the share is more than 30 percent and sliding. America could produce enough tomatoes throughout the year to save supermarkets-florida there is still a lot of but that is simply not logical. “It is not cost -effective,” said Luis Ribera, an agricultural economist at Texas A & M University, Me. “We can deliver tomatoes all year round at the prices we have.” In contrast to Mexico, Florida mainly grows his tomatoes outside, despite the fact that it is not suitable to grow the tomato in the open air in almost all ways: the soil is inhospitable. The humidity is an incubator for illness. There are ordinary hurricanes. “From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective,” wrote the food journalist Barry Estabrook in Tomatoland“You should be an idiot to try to grow tomatoes commercially in a place like Florida.”
Exactly what the rates will mean for supermarket prices is hard to say. Tomatoes are taxed when they cross the border, so importers and distributors will pay the costs directly. But in the end the increase will probably drip to the supermarket. The story of rates, said Ribera, is that “the lion’s share is paid by consumers.” In the short term, Richards estimated that price increases depends strongly on the variety of tomato, with Romas the hardest hit. “That is the one we trust most from Mexico,” he said. Beefsteaks, he added, will get a smaller increase.
Compared to some of the other drastic rates that Trump imposed, a price bump of 17 percent on Mexican tomatoes hardly forces the tomato pocalypse. Last year, the average import price Mexican tomatoes was about 74 cents per pound. If the entire increase of 17 percent is passed on to consumers, we would look at another 13 cents – enough to notice, but not enough for a critical mass of people to completely refrain from Rombens. Here the other is: people want tomatoes, and they want them now. ‘We don’t do that want to To wait until things are in the season, “said Ribera, and we’re not going to start.
For all the many problems with tomatoes out of season, Americans continue to eat them. It was where winter tomatoes were a novelty: “I don’t know why housewives have the feeling that they should have tomatoes,” a bewildered supplier told The New York Times In 1954. But they did, and people still do that. Season to season, our national tomato consumption fluctuates relatively little, the analyst of the supermarket Phil Lempert told me. Every hamburger joint in America needs tomatoes – not the best tomatoes, but tomatoes that exist. There is one whole recipe genre About how Make the most From tomatoes out of season. A lesser tomato is of course better than no tomato at all.
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