Thursday, March 30, 2006

Tomatoes and Immigration

Warning: Useless post.

One the arguments I've heard used this week from those wanting to "ship them all home" goes like this:

"Oh yeah, well, in the 50's under Ike they said if we sent them all home there'd be no one to pick the tomatoes. Well we got around that, we developed machines to pick the tomatoes."

I guess the argument is that we got around the labor shortage by technology.

BUT, my response to that is this, sure we machine pick tomatoes now but we also had to develop tomatoes that could withstand the much rougher treatment that these machines give the tomatoes. Accordingly, I HATE the cheap store-bought tomatoes . One has to spring for the "organic, hand-picked" types to get anything remotely edible...which I hate to do on general principles (guess I'm no Crunchy-con). Any tomato on a fast-food hamburger, for instance, is like a piece of cardboard.

Granted, I'm too young to recall store-boughts before they became machine picked, but I've heard they used to be much better.

Got my tomatoes in the ground in January thanks to our mild winter. The fruit are just starting to redden.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I hate tomatoes, I say tomatoes, that don't taste of anything. Here in the 17th century we mostly get the good ones.

If you send back all the imigrants who will polish the tomatoe picking machines?

Judas Penrose
Poetry Politics and Piracy

Scooter said...

Ah, to live in the 17th century.