Your. Shitty. Tomato.

In a great post by Kurt Michael Friese on Huffpost food he speaks on behalf of the tomatoes demise in American Agriculture and diet. We've all known for years that the nutritional value, taste and sizing have been distinct of it's natural state for some time now. Friese also points out the book by two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit - which discusses these topics in detail.

If you haven't, go read the post and then grab the book. You'll be in good company if you're sick of shitty tomatoes. Some of the valid and main points of the article and book is that the industry is basically followed suit with the cheese, dairy and meat industries. Factory farmed hybrid-like units created for optimum shipping dynamics. Again, Friese points out from a recent USDA study that,

The average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has "30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium."

Why? Because the metrics of the product are solely based on cost and transportable attributes. We have completely negated quality and nutritional functions to support our food culture that wants to eat "whatever - whenever".

According to Friese,

In Immokalee Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it's not flavor, and it's not nutrition. It's shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

Like in most products of our Mega retail driven society, the food is force-ripened with gas to create the allusion of a "fresh" ripened red tomato. It's our enormous appetite that has caused us to get into this quagmire and only by changing our eating habits will we eventually move away from this centralized eco-system of shit food.