Tomato, Tomahto

A couple weeks ago I went strawberry picking and while I was paying for my berries I noticed they had two greenhouses full of tomato plants. I asked the guy working if they sell the tomatoes out of their stand or if they sell them to grocery stores. He said they sell them out of their stand and I started asking about their growing methods and such. He offered to let me tour the greenhouse and I thought it was really interesting how they grew them. They are grown in 5 gallon bucket sized plastic bags and their branches are trained/wound up a string that is connected to bars that run above the plants. Anyway he was telling me the biggest problem with growing tomatoes is managing the splitting problem. If you have ever grown your own tomatoes then you are familiar with how the tops of the tomato can split as it ripens. The splits heal over with brown scale like skin that isn't too pretty.

Anyway, so then he was telling me how he can't sell split tomatoes and I was amazed. He doesn't even try to sell them, even at a discount. People just won't buy them, he said. I then learned something I had always wondered about. Every time I have bought tomatoes in the store I have wondered how it is they have managed to A. Get the tomato so perfect looking, perfect coloring, perfect shape and B. Why do store bought tomatoes have to be so tasteless, surely they can produce tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes, right? It can't be that hard.
I never realized the problem was that they are sacrificing taste to cosmetic appeal snd "shippability". You rarely see a green tomato on the vine that's split and that's exactly when they pick them. I should have figured this out sooner but I just never imagined that a tomato that's as green as a green bean would ever actually ripen in any amount of time. The answer is ethylene gas which is what commercial growers use to turn green tomatoes red, or rather pinkish red in my opinion. You get next to no damage when shipping green tomatoes whereas ripe ones simply won't make the trip.
Huh. So that's how they do it. So in reality we are eating unripe tomatoes when we buy them from the store. I told the strawberry stand guy "I would rather eat a split tomato that tastes good than a perfect tomato that tastes like crap though." He replied, "Yeah, people just don't have any common sense." He then proceeded to give me as many split tomatoes as I wanted for free. Hey, at least I got something out of the deal. What a shame though, I can't believe how much people are willing to miss out on for the sake of cosmetic appeal. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me though considered the other things people do for cosmetic appeal. Well anyway, here's to a split tomato that is worthy of two slices of toast and some mayo!