Plato never knew what a tomato was. He lived 2,000 years before the Italians began to grow the fruit which now is a standard feature of a Mediterranean summer, like a day at the beach and the scent of tanning oil.
But Plato’s philosophy of ideal forms – of the quintessence of things – might well have elevated the Maltese tomato, with its deep-red, real tomatoey flavour, to be the closest you could get to the ideal tomato.
In which case, what’s a Maltese summer without real tomatoes like?
If you haven’t got the reports from the news, you’ll have got it from your greengrocer. The blistering heat has destroyed a large proportion of the Maltese crop (together with some other vegetables, like peppers and cucumbers).
It seems to have happened worldwide, striking even the US and UK, not just us, but, naturally, our tragedy is greater: our tomatoes are real, unlike those northern, pink, waxen imitations whose proper place is at Madame Tussaud’s to honour our own.
The reports say that a third of this year’s crop has been lost. That sounds like a conservative estimate to go by what my greengrocer tells me. He hasn’t been finding any at the local farmer’s market; he’s resorted to selling pale imports.
Ebullient by nature, he’s taken to communicating on the subject without using words – raising his shoulders in a slow shrug, the helpless sadness rising past his eyes and eyebrows to the furrowed forehead. He uses silence to prepare me gently for the worst.
Tomatoes are essential to the true experience of summer. They are the yin to ice-cream’s yang – the best kind of warm saltiness to contrast with cold sweetness.
Every plum tomato is a package of goodness. And dreams of goodness. In a society where almost everything worthwhile is expensive, the sea is free and tomatoes (at peak season) almost free.
And they’re at their best at the same time of the year. It’s almost as though the gods, too, take an annual August holiday, during which they stop administering the laws of karma.
Tomatoes and the sea are things we enjoy that are actually good for us. They enrich each other. There’s nothing like sea salt to bring out the best of tomatoes. A tomato sandwich at the beach intensifies our enjoyment of the sea itself.
Anyone can make the sandwich. It’s within everyone’s culinary reach and pocket- Ranier Fsadni
We call the sandwich ħobż biż-żejt (bread with oil) and wrong the tomato by giving top billing to the olive oil, a supporting actor whose function is to seal in the tomato that has penetrated the bread. But the tomato is a forgiving fruit and brings the taste of the sea to the land, right inside our home.
Anyone can make the sandwich. It’s within everyone’s culinary reach and pocket. Yet, every family has its idea of the right balance of ingredients, its guarded path to perfection.
We all know someone credited with ‘really’ knowing how to make the perfect ħobż biż-żejt, using techniques that require moral virtues. Persistence, to experiment with different ingredients and quantities. Patience and delayed gratification, if the secret lies in gentle heating in a conventional oven (a microwave would never do). Dedication, if perfection lies in driving miles to the right bakery. Pietas, when preserving a formula handed down in the family.
It’s never just about the food. It’s a vision of life. Ħobż biż-żejt is an image of goodness, health, simplicity, rusticity and national identity. At the height of his power, Julius Caesar prided himself on his soldier’s fare of bread and oil for breakfast; had he lived to see the tomato, he’d have breakfasted on our national sandwich and made it Roman.
Ħobż biż-żejt is one of those few things, like popping champagne and cutting a cake, that simply is better when eaten in company. It’s about savoir-vivre – and, therefore, worldly – but also about sharing and the things that matter and, thus, spiritual.
“They really have the best ħobż biż-żejt” is a locution that belongs with those other pillars of middle-class wisdom: “Malta needs a third political party”; “that confectioner has let his children take over and things haven’t been the same since”; and “we still have a colonial mentality”.
Everyone can show they partake of this vision of the good life. You may not know how to make the perfect ħobż biż-żejt (yet) but you can always point to where it can be found: ideally, a working-class bar in an esoteric place in some corner of the country, deep in a labyrinth of narrow streets of a village whose name begins with Z or Q (so foreigners have difficulty pronouncing it, let alone finding the place).
All this, friends, is what we’re missing this summer. Will it be just an unfortunate episode, so that we can, one day, reminisce about the summer of 2021 and how terrible it was?
Or is it a sign of a deeper, more sinister change? Is the tomato going the way of the fig – with our trees decimated and figs super-expensive? The way of the sea – growing warmer and tropical, inviting new kinds of jellyfish and other predators to invade and change our marine ecology?
In this case, the vanishing tomato would be the symbol we’d choose for the consequences of climate change: of how the sun we so loved became (in the words of David Foster Wallace) a keyhole view of hell.