It is early summer in Oakland, which means that soon I will be able to get my hands on as many tomatoes as I want. I will eat them with olive oil and salt. On salads. As sauce. The farmers market is only a few blocks away, and I will walk there with a two-gallon tote.
This, even though I know what comes of tomatoes in my orbit. Most of my tomatoes will go, I admit, guiltily, uneaten to the back of the fridge. Eventually, eating them will become a kind of punishment for excess. A daily confrontation with sweet, exuberant abundance and its other side—greed, waste—and my complicity in it all. How can I not sink myself, elbows deep, into the luscious tomato in its season?
It is not that I take tomatoes for granted. I was visiting my East Coast family during winter break, and was making salad for dinner. My sister had a pint of cherry tomatoes. I bit into one of the small, hard, pale things. I spat it out. It was sour and watery, with a faint chemical aftertaste. “Your tomatoes have all gone bad,” I told her. “There is something terribly wrong with your tomatoes.”
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She ate one. “This is what tomatoes taste like. You have been on the West Coast too long.”
My first summer in Oakland, years ago, a new neighbor offered to help me plant some tomatoes. I had just finished law school and begun a fellowship with an advocacy organization led by formerly incarcerated people. We were co-counsel in a lawsuit, Ashker v. Brown, part of a larger protest movement against solitary confinement that began in 2011 with a series of hunger strikes. A movement to remind us on the outside about food and resistance, food and freedom. I wanted to connect with food in this new home of mine—a place of wealth and abundance, protest and prisons—and I thought growing a garden could be a way to do that.
We planted a handful of seeds in my backyard, between the angel’s-trumpet and the tree collards. Not everything that we planted survived. But some weeks later, I saw pale green buds with yellow flowers. Then hard green globes. Red and orange fruit! Anyone who has grown their first edible plant knows that no tomato will ever be as delicious as those tomatoes. Food and resistance, I thought, might be as simple and sweet as growing your own tomato plant.
But there is growing a handful of tomatoes, and then there is growing tomatoes. I worked for a few seasons as a market hand for Riverdog Farm. In late July, after dozens of farmworkers planted and harvested, then packed produce onto the truck, we would need extra helpers just to unload tomatoes: Early Girls, Sungolds, Gold Nuggets, Brandywines, Marvel Stripes, and Green Zebras. At the end of the night, the lot was slippery with squashed tomatoes, and the farmer would rumble home, to begin again at dawn.
These luscious tomatoes are the descendants of blueberry-size wild tomatoes from South America. They were domesticated likely in Mexico before being brought, probably by Spanish merchants and colonists, to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and to North America by the 18th century. By the 1970s, California farms were producing 80 percent of tomatoes grown in the United States. Today, those farms are still worked for low wages, under harsh conditions, by people who have migrated north from Mexico and Central America.
These inbred domestic tomatoes, even our beloved local heirlooms, have lost many of the genes belonging to their wild cousins. As a result, they can be more vulnerable to disease, drought, pests, and other climate change impacts. This makes farmers’ work ever more difficult and tenuous. Tomatoes are sweet, yes. But the tomato industry is relentless.
This is all to explain, to excuse, to justify myself each summer when I yearn for bucketfuls of tomatoes that I could not possibly eat. It is that I yearn to hold large unwieldy systems, within a space small enough to feel them.
Tomatoes are the works of days and hands and places I can never fully touch. But I can touch the lone tomato. Better, I can touch tons of tomatoes. I can hold them in my arms, I can tuck them into my mouth. I can try to turn them into something else again—a body, life, reckless abundance.
