Heirloom Tomatoes: WTF!

I go to Whole Foods all the time when I'm hungry, and it's so stupid because I always walk out with $200 worth of vegetables I have to work around the clock to eat before they go bad. But everything looks good and I'm helpless against the temptation of "the wild bunch" mushroom pack and $4.99/lb cherries.

So last night I walked out with a bag of heirloom tomatoes. The best description I found was on this person's flickr page: "A true heirloom tomato is a cultivar whose seeds had been nurtured, selected, and handed down from one family member to another for many generations. What allows it to maintain the heirloom name is that no genetically modified organism (GMO) can be used in its production. It conjures up an image of backyard plant grown from hard-sought seeds, of rare fruit bursting in summer's heat."

I got home and sliced one up, and I was totally unprepared for what was inside. The exterior of this plant was green fading into red, and the interior was pretty much the same except it was black. Black, as in rotten? But the black flesh wasn't crumbly or mushy like rotting fruit is; it was as firm and clean as the rest of the tomato. Humm, must just be the color, I thought, and ate a mouthful of black tomato. Wrong! It was very, very bitter. And weird. So my next thought was: is this normal?

Let me do some more investigative work and get back to you.

Seed Savers

I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now. It's about her year of food on her family farm in Virginia and how the family will only eat locally produced food. These kind of "off the grid" "back to a more simple way" types of experiments constantly interest me and seem to be popular these days. I would like to think I could do it, but the other part of me thinks I like chocolate pop-tarts. Barbara's fictional books bore me, and I've never been able to get through one of them. This book so far has been more entertaining. In the last section I read about the Seed Savers Exchange. The nonprofit exchange is focused on saving the seeds of heirlooms for people to have access to for generations. I'm not quoting Barbara correctly by any means, but basically a large portion of the seeds available for planting are corporately controlled by a few companies. And the seeds aren't that great because companies want farmers to buy new seeds every year instead of saving seeds to preserve a unique food. That's the basic gist, and we're the losers left to suffer with inferior tasting cauliflower, tomatoes, melons, etc. Yikes! I just wanted to post it in the event I do get a garden and find myself "off the grid", I'll have a place to start.