String Cheese - Article Ten

Tomatoes Ripe for Revolution!
by Aryn Corley

The end is near.
It’s time to pack up our earthly belongings and get ready for that sweet chariot to “swing low.” When the tomatoes have had their way with us, there will be nothing left but roaches, our ghosts, and two plumbers trying to videotape us.
The recent salmonella outbreak among our nation’s tomato crop is nothing short of a well-coordinated terrorist attack. The tomatoes are tired of us and they aren’t taking it anymore.
Could their hatred of humanity be justified?
Millions and millions of tomatoes are slaughtered every year to satisfy humanity’s insatiable appetite. It seems the tomato is destined for one thing: food. Scores of tomatoes have worked hard to reach their full potential only to end up as a garnish. Or worse yet, a little rose on a food display in some country club.
Tomatoes have to brave extreme temperatures, disease and ravenous insects to even get a chance to compete in this world. Life is pretty bad when PETA activists have no ethical dilemma about eating you.
Before the attack, we had a wonderful relationship with our vegetable cousin, the tomato. Our two species have much in common. Both have many of which are rotten. We both have mushy insides. We were both kicked out of a garden.
Our popular culture is littered with tributes to the tomato. Country singer Guy Clark sung praises about “Homegrown Tomatoes.” Author Fannie Flagg (yep, from the “Match Game”) wrote a book called “Fried Green Tomatoes,” which was later made into a movie that seemed to seep with estrogen. And who could forget the eerily prophetic, John De Bello classic, “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?”
Just up the road, a small town called Jacksonville has its whole identity wrapped up in the tomato. The local high school, whose mascot is the “Fightin’ Indian,” plays its home games at the Tomato Bowl. They even have an annual Tomato Fest on the second Saturday in June. Someone needs to warn the citizens of Jacksonville to this new threat!
In Eastern Spain, in a small town named Bunol, on the last Wednesday in August, La Tomatina breaks out and the town is fully engulfed in a tomato war for about two hours. When the tomato carnage is over, the streets look like the aftermath of the Battle of Del Monte.
It should come as no surprise that these insidious insurgent tomatoes tried to get one of their own nested in the highest office of our government. Senator John Kerry’s wife, Theresa Heinz Kerry, currently holds the patent to ketchup. Thankfully, Bush “stole” the election and kept the White House from getting stained.
It’s hard to see just where things went wrong.
This animosity toward us may be the result of our inability to properly categorize tomatoes as fruits. Since the tomato grows from the ovary of the plant and contains the seeds within it’s a fruit. Vegetables are generally the extraneous edible parts of a plant (e.g. cabbage leaves). If you really want to blow your mind, try figuring out if a banana is a fruit or an herb. Thankfully, bananas are dumb or else they’d develop nukes and let us really have it.
Right now the tomatoes are winning. If we are to combat this menace we can’t let these foul fruits dictate how we live our lives. If we start taking tomatoes off the menu, what’s next? We can’t give in to the hysteria. The government is invariably going to add another color to the already recondite terror alert. In the War Room at the Pentagon, some general will be yelling, “Take us to Def Con Prego!”
If there is to be an epic battle in Texas, between man and tomato, I’m going to the Alamo to make my last stand. When the historical (or hysterical) commission erects a monument, it will read: “‘Lettuce’ remember the bravery of those who endeavored to ‘squash’ such evil tomatoes, and whose ‘thyme’ was cut so short. May they rest in ‘peas.’”