Hi-tech Tomatoes
This morning, while cutting a tomato, I went through a rather strange experience, which prompted me to look at the business of growing tomatoes.
Here’s what I’m talking about, with flash:
..and without:
One of the tomato seeds had sprouted inside the tomato!
I was too hungry to take a photo of the tomato while it was still more or less recognizable, but it was a hydroponic tomato from Mexico. I kept it on the counter for about a couple of weeks or more, because it felt hard to the touch and tough uniformly red, its insides were rather white. It never became more ripe, suggesting either that it’s choke full of preservatives, or its genes won’t allow it to ripe. It reminded me of two stories:
- Seventy-five year old Ron Sveden, of Brewster, Massachusetts, who suffers from emphysema and pulmonary disease, has been using an oxygen mask for 18 months. He has a history as a smoker and worked by smoking fish. X-rays showed a growth and doctors found that the lower lobe of one of his lungs had collapsed, so Sveden prepared himself for a diagnosis of cancer. More than a dozen biopsies were done, but none indicated cancer so Dr. Scott Slater Slater consulted his colleague Dr. Jeff Spillane. On June 16 Spillane put Sveden under anaesthetic and scraped at the mass. It was then that he discovered it was a half-inch sprout. It had become coasted with a white crust that made it resemble a tumour.
- In 2009, 28-year-old Artyom Sidorkin went to a hospital in Russia with chest pains and coughing up blood. A five-centimetre fir tree was found growing in one of his lungs.
There are those who claim that hydroponic tomatoes are grown at a higher standard of purity than “organic” ones.
Since then, I planted the seedling next to one of my tropical plants.
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