The Last Tomatoes

At our local market, there is a farmer who comes from Brandenburg each Saturday to sell his fruits and vegetables. Horst is a character. He lectures - that's the only word for it - concerning the nature, diversity, origins, and most of all superiority of his products. I have seen him hold customers in rapt attention for 10 minutes, when all they really wanted was a kilo of potatoes. He makes them try different things and note the texture, the aroma (a favorite word), and flavor of items as seemingly modest as a piece of celery.

Brandenburg is the province surrounding Berlin that was formerly part of East Germany. It's known for its sandy soil, but some regions, Werder in particular, are famous for their excellent produce. Horst's farm is in Werder.

It was one of the tragedies of Germany's division that the people of Berlin were cut off from the farmers of Brandenburg. In the West, of course, they were cut off by the wall. In the East, they were cut off by government economic planners, who decided that Brandenburg's legendary pears, plums, and tomatoes were best allocated for export. Apples, I seem to recall, were available at least part of the year. Garlic, I remember complaining, was nowhere to be found.

[A West Berlin friend who knew me during my 4-month stay behind the iron curtain in 1988 says, in fact, that the thing only I ever complained about back then was the lack of garlic. I probably suspected anti-Semitic conspiracy.]

Horst, it seems, is making up for lost time. He not only tries to educate the curious (and not so curious) about the intricacies of farming, but he invites his customers to the farm once a year at planting time. He clearly doesn't care who they are. He spends equal time with well-heeled businessmen, grungy students, and elderly couples, though he does seem to zero on attractive woman a little more quickly. Everyone gets grabbed by the arm. Sometimes in his exuberance, he'll just stuff a piece of fruit in a person's mouth without asking.

He'll argue with you -- he finds it incomprehensible that anyone could prefer flat Italian parsley to the trusted curly north European variety -- but he's remarkably patient too. He probably feels a little sorry for us: with our strange culinary prejudices combined with an essential ignorance of everything that comes out of the ground or once stood on four legs.

I like Horst, but I am truly mesmerized by his produce. Perhaps it's all a dog and pony show, but then, hey, "ruff ruff." I never had such fantastic strawberries, and for that alone I'm grateful. I think of the strawberries in America, tasteless, dry, scentless and with an unnatural crispness, and I wonder how such different products could even have the same name. Whether you're in Binghamton, NY or Brunswick, ME, or Ballwin, MO, American strawberries always seem to come from Watsonville, CA. Is this Watsonville even a real town, or is it just an imaginary place, dreamed up by some corporate brander, like the Hamburgerville (?) where Ronald McDonald, the Hamburgler and friends live in perpetual fun?

One-hundred years ago American social reformers feared that children would grow up never understanding their connection to the farm: never knowing the smell of cut hay or the taste of fresh eggs and milk. We know what happened to that concern.

Now you have to wonder if a generation of kids is growing up who will never have the experience of biting into a strawberry and having the juice drip down their chins, and whose concept of a tomato will always be a shiny, plastic-like decorative element that must be smothered in "special sauce" before it has any taste.