10/23/2025
Life is too short for round, red tomatoes!🍅 My daughter came home from the fall fair at school and expressed a hint of disappointment at the lack of variety of tomatoes entered. “They were all red and round”. Her disappointment does seem odd considering the vast majority of us are so accustomed to seeing these perfectly round, shiny (and largely flavourless) fruits in big piles of uniformity in grocery store shelves. I’m here to tell you that life is too short for this amount of bland conformity.
The world has lost 75% of seed diversity among food crops since the 1900s, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Food crops are now bred for production, storage life and conformity to appeal to the consumer who has grown up to expect a tomato to be round and red and just the right size for a burger in a fast food chain. This means we are losing diversity and, in particular, locally adapted crops that thrive in very diverse microclimates…like my chickensh*t greenhouse where the hens overwinter or a pot on your patio or that special sunny spot in your garden.
Consumerism has also led us to believe that we must BUY seeds and seedlings when the opposite is so much more revolutionary! Buy an heirloom tomato at the farmers market and scrape the seeds out, visit a small, local grower and buy their seedlings, seek out the seed companies that are closest to you and buy up their seeds (not some corporation that is several provinces away) or for goodness sakes just save the seeds from your own produce year after year. These seeds are your food freedom and will improve year after year as they strongly adapt to your little place in the world and they will grow you tomatoes that taste like home. Seeds are everywhere and saving them is an art that we would do best not to lose!