I am changing our taxonomy. No longer can we be called Homo sapiens sapiens. There is nothing sapient about us anymore. Homo stultus should be our new cognomen.
I don’t say this because one more democracy has opted for an autocrat; or even because all human existence is now extracorporeal, lived out on microchips. These count, yes, but something else compels me right now.
I am in a café. A guy across the room has a plastic bottle poised above his plate. His face is intent, beatific. His fist tightens. The nozzle gives. And gives. And gives. The extruding velvet gloop, shiny and scarlet, dangles and thins with the thixotropy of a blood clot.
No arterial gush, nothing impulsive nor immediate. This is the memory of carnage, malevolence absolut, the mindless squeeze on the trachea, the bullet in the brain.
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Tomato sauce is as little about the tomato as a blood clot is about the life just erased. Both are about violence. Since its invention, this satiny sweet-sour couverture has bullied a zillion quarrelsome tastebuds into a global docility of taste, coaxed us to cravenly swallow just about anything, and consider ourselves well-fed. Homo stultus, we.
Still, this benumbing sauce has done us no greater violence than we have done to the tomato.
A portrait of Bernardino de Sahagún from the 17th century. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
A few years after Hernán Cortés destroyed Mexico, a young Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590), began exploring Aztec culture. He trawled the markets where conquistadors stuffed themselves sick on salsa and recorded the varieties of tomato on sale. Any of these is guaranteed to vivify the wilt of carnal excess, he wrote in The General History of the Things of New Spain. Europe sat up and took notice.
In such early descriptions, the tomato is already squished to a pulp. These are consumer narratives: blasé, utilitarian, fatal to the soul. I have my own moment of discovery.
****
Every schoolchild deserves a genie. Mine was Mr Jacob Thomas Matthews. Engaged to teach science, he let me wander footloose in the web of life, steering me occasionally towards wonders I hadn’t noticed.
The tomato was one such.
I’m eight, and it is May. I’ve been watching a small bubble of pale green on a fragrant shrub for a week. It is as big as a lemon now, but tighter, shinier, as if it might burst at next breath. The leaves are lacy and lush, deliciously scented, but a faint prickle against the fingertip discourages nibbling. For a week I’ve counted six different shades of green on this plant, now the berry has spoilt it all with a corrupting streak of red. The redness spreads with the urgency of a boil, and worried for that berry, I summon my genie.
“That first berry had a top note of wild green, followed by what my brain called “garden smell”—mud, crushed grass, flowers.”
Mr Matthews glances at the berry and is about to speak—when he bites back the word on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he says, “Aha! Lycopersicum esculentum,” and turns away while I work that out.
Lyco—surely that’s wolf?
And esculentum only means I can eat it.
“What is persicum?” I ask.
“Try peach.”
Impossible! A peach is a cuddly sort of fruit. This one, I know, might bare its teeth and snarl.
“Why lyco?” he challenges.
“Because the leaves have prickles?”
“Hmm … Maybe, maybe not.”
“But it isn’t a peach,” I argue. “This can never be a peach. It is a—a—” And, at the unspoken word, I’m cramped with misery, realising just what my berry will become. Gravy.
“It can never be just a tomato,” says Mr Matthews. “You’ll discover the wolf in it.”
I’ve been looking for that wolf ever since. Perhaps that’s why I never bite into a tomato. I hold up a thin slice against the light, its two-chambered heart pulses with jelly, and I await the first drip of sweet-sour nectar on my tongue.
The scarlet velvety gloop that is the tomato sauce. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock
The scent of a freshly sliced tomato has dimmed over time. That first berry had a top note of wild green, followed by what my brain called “garden smell”—mud, crushed grass, flowers. Next came what made the berry really special: a heady, festive rush of hot syrup. Then that too passed, leaving an almost human odour of tiredness, the scent of the house when the guests have left.
A baa-lamb in wolf’s clothing
Today’s tomato smells so clean and clinical, I thought I had imagined that memory, so I checked out tomato volatiles and found molecules to match. No wolf, though.
But wait! The wild green top note, the scent of the glycoalkaloid tomatine, didn’t that justify the Latin name? It likened the tomato to its distant relative, the deadly nightshade, and kept Europe from eating the fruit for two centuries. When James Mease (1771-1846) invented tomato ketchup in 1812, folk finally conceded that the tomato was just a baa-lamb in wolf’s clothing.
The paradox puzzled me. Why should the fruit seem less dangerous squished and bottled? After all, a blob of sauce is simply more tomato.
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Today the tomato is prized for its redness, which derives from the magic molecule lycopene, that will liberate humanity from cancer. The average tomato has a niggardly 4 mg of lycopene. A dollop of sauce can triple that. So we eat 1.6 million tons of tomato sauce and get ourselves 22 million new cases of cancer each year.
The tomato makes wolves of us, ravening for benefits we think are entitlements. Lycopene is recent but the trope is ancient: if it is strange, it must be possessed, pummeled out of recognition, enslaved into convenience and conformity and consumed insatiably.
The wolf in the berry is Homo stultus, we.
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right (Roli, 2023).
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