‘Not much for supper tonight, then,” Nature Boy commented when I placed the plates on the table. They were the two smallest plates in the house. Each was adorned with half of a cherry tomato, a sprig of basil leaves, and a few grains of salt.
“Think of this as just the nibble delivered to the table for you to enjoy as you peruse the menu,” I said. “Just as if this were a high-end, nouvelle cuisine restaurant.”
“My bouche is not amused,” he replied.
“It cost about as much as what you would pay there, too,” I add.
“Wait! Is it the first?” He looked momentarily excited.
“Yes, it’s the first of the season from the garden.”
“But you could have just eaten it. I would never have known.”
“Well, given that this one shrimpy-sized tomato has cost us about $30, I thought I’d share so you can enjoy it, too.”
He poked at it with his fork. “It has a good colour — a rich vermilion, as one would expect.”
He lowered his face to the plate and sniffed loudly. “It smells like fresh tomato — a hint of pepperiness over fruity sweetness.”
He scooped it up, popped it into his mouth, chewed a couple of times, then sat there with it in his mouth for a few seconds. Then he swallowed.
“That exceeds expectation,” he said. “I’d forgotten over the last nine months how flavourful just-picked vine-ripened tomatoes are.” He looked at me. “There’ll be more where those came from in the coming weeks, right?”
It has been now about a month since we ate that first home-grown cherry-tom flavour bomb of 2019. The amount that that first fruit of the season cost to grow — counting what we paid for soil, seedlings, and water — was less than half the estimated cost of the heirloom tomato that figures in the exhaustive title of U.S. author William Alexander’s book, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. The book chronicles Alexander’s adventures, experiences and trials in transforming his yard into a vegetable garden.
However, direct comparisons between his tomato and ours quickly mire. Our tiny tomato was less than one quarter the size of any full-size tomato, heirloom or otherwise.
The gardens differ in scale and complexity, too. His was a large yard that had to be cleared of grass, rocks and weeds, then built up into a full, diverse vegetable garden. Ours is a single, empty, decade-old cedar planter that had to have the spider webs swept out before it was filled with three bags of rich sea soil to hold two tomato seedlings.
Furthermore, the tomato on our plate that late-July evening came into being more than a dozen years after Alexander’s book was published. A 2019 dollar has only about 80 per cent of the purchasing power that a 2005 dollar had, when Alexander’s tomato existed. And he dealt in U.S. dollars, compared with our Canadian loonies, at an end-July 2005 exchange rate of about 1.23. This means, at the simplest level, Alexander’s $64 US (2005) tomato would be worth about $98.40 Cdn today.
The basic equations for calculating cost also differ — his included all his gardening expenses that year against his entire harvest for the year, which was varied and abundant. Ours included all my 2019 garden-box expenses against the single first tomato produced and harvested, knowing the cost would decrease as more tomatoes grew, ripened and were eaten.
And the two cherry tomato vines in our planter have indeed yielded dozens of fruit since Nature Boy’s first dinner-time nibble. Each red and golden orb picked has lowered the per unit cost. With new fruit ripening daily, they’re getting more and more affordable overall. Strictly in terms of cost to grow, each cherry tomato picked today costs about 42 cents.
In terms of flavour and the satisfaction of eating produce we have grown ourselves, however, they may be priceless.
There aren’t many high-end restaurants that offer just-picked tomatoes still warm from the sun on the menu.
Even for $30 each.
