A Song of Tomatoes to My Grandmother

If there is a better-smelling vegetable than a tomato grown in dirt and ripened in the sun, I don’t know it. But I know I could almost conjure up that smell just from looking at my father’s old Super 8 video home movies. I think a tomato is my first sensory memory, though I’m sure having the movie available to me as a kid helped amplify this remembrance.

One of my parents’ favorite home movies of me takes place in their suburban Chicago house in the seventies. I was maybe two to three years old, trailing my mother, trying to get her attention while she worked out any stray weeds in their garden. The movie cuts, and we see my mother finally turn to me as I waddle over, this time holding a bevy of green tomatoes in the bucket of my dress, smiling and so proud: just like Mommy! Clearly she hadn’t discovered the deliciousness of the green tomato like she has now. I can almost hear Mom’s expletives in Tagalog, but can you blame me? I must have watched her pick red tomatoes all morning, and I’ve wanted to be just like her since I can remember: raven wavy hair, stylish clothes, even in the garden. What the camera doesn’t show in this garden—their very first garden in a new country, all of time stretched out before her—is a question mark of when she will see her family in the Philippines again.

In the 16th century, the Spanish brought the tomato to the Philippines, and the Portuguese brought the tomato to India, and I—South Asian Filipina—planted my family’s first tomato plants in north Mississippi in 2020. Along with thousands and thousands of people, we started tending to our gardens with a renewed sense of attention that year. We were home more often, so no more missed watering days, no excuses for letting our vegetables dry up. My husband and I had gardened together since we were first dating back in western New York, but this was to be a totally new plant hardiness zone: our first veggie garden in Mississippi.

The fear of tomatoes goes back hundreds of years. Folks in the Middle Ages thought tomatoes were poisonous, but that’s only because they regularly ate them off pewter plates, which leached lead. In 1883, acrobat-performer John Ritchie was famously pelted with them after an audience disapproved of his performance, forcing him to flee the theater in a “perfect shower of tomatoes.” As a kid, I remember funny, garish posters that screamed: “The nation is in chaos—can nothing stop this tomato onslaught?” This was the tag line for the 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, in which tomatoes lurked in corners and swimming pools waiting to harm Earth’s citizens.

The Guinness Book of World Records notes that the largest-ever tomato plant grew in Epcot Center and produced over 32 thousand tomatoes, or over one thousand pounds of them, before it died in 2010. The gardeners pruned it as if it were a tree, with its stems utterly bare, no runners or leaves, until the umbrella of branches and fruit towered over twenty feet tall.

Food writers and cooks say the tomato represents umami flavor the best because its savory but sweet flavor comes from its high acid content. Soy sauce and fish sauce are all foods high in umami, so it’s no surprise they pair deliciously with tomatoes too.

For my mother, the seeds have long been planted in her mind that the garden was a sort of shelter, perhaps a way to control and think about something else besides missing her own family. Her tiny mother (my Lola Felipa) remains frozen with a perpetual soft smile in the framed picture in our living room, already a ghost for three years by the time that gardening home movie was taken, as my mom lost her just a month after she gave birth to me during a hard winter in Chicago.

I think that ghost still travels across the ocean to her granddaughter, and has been for over 49 years—this granddaughter who skim-searches the face of every elderly Filipina that she encounters for a sweet and resigned smile just like in her mom’s framed picture.

I write this song of tomatoes to my Lola and wonder if she would be amazed, if she would smile at my life, and what I’ve made with my husband and my own garden. What would the clicks of her tiny kitten heels on my paver stones sound like? And would those clicks rhyme with the bubbles of our birdbath? And would it make sense to her plumeria trees, back across the ocean and into the Philippines? Or would it be more like a joke she’s too tired to ask my mother to translate, and would she just leave me with a tired chuckle, a pat on my hands while bringing them to her face so she could smell the tomatoes she never knew how to grow?

From Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Copyright © 2024 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.