Suzuki Roshi said, "When you are cooking, you're not just working on food. You're working on yourself. You're working on other people."

How to Cook Your Life
September/October 2008

from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and Reflections (Riverhead: 1997), by Edward Espe Brown.  All rights reserved.

Tomato Ecstasy

Almost everyone has the capacity to taste, to discriminate between various flavors, yet having the capacity doesn’t mean that people exercise it. One reason it is underutilized is that people tend to be timid about using language to articulate differences they have noticed. I find it fascinating how language helps develop taste. Often, when we cannot put a label on what we’ve noticed, it loses its significance. Conversely, when awareness has labels to attach to experience, suddenly details and nuances are relevant; they can be tagged.

One example of this is professional tea tasting. According to an article I read, almost anyone with appropriate training can learn to be a tea taster. Participants at tea-tasting school are given twenty different teas and told, "This is what we mean by bright." Even though the twenty teas are different, they have one common characteristic, "bright," which the tasters are expected to identify. Another twenty teas are "bold" or "smoky," "chesty" or "full-bodied." In this way one can learn the requisite language and subsequently be able to pick out the bright or bold which gives Lipton or Twinings its distinctive flavor.

Outside the context of a particular profession with its specific terminology, we are often at a loss. In response to the question, "What is the flavor of a tomato?" we are likely to throw up our hands in exasperation—"Well, you know, it tastes like a tomato!" as if that explained it, and in our culture it often does. Growers market pale red objects that are shaped like tomatoes but have a mealy dry texture with the flavor of mildly tart water, and still they make a killing. The buying public doesn’t find the distinctions important enough to give them voice.

Our culture teaches us that food is only food, a tomato is only a tomato (no matter how bland and insipid it is), and we learn not to pay attention to what is most important: the essential vibrancy of tomato. When we fail to notice the essential juicy, lush, and meaty vibrancy of tomato, somewhere inside us our “heart” shrivels up, our succulent fecundity is unrecognized and uncalled for. We too are dry and mealy, and longing for something to break us open and make us feel alive and flowing.

In late summer I go to the Real Foods market on Stanyan Street in San Francisco and I buy tomatoes: Beefsteak tomatoes, Golden Jubilee, Lemon Boy, Striped Marvel, Zebras, Purple Cherokee, Green Grape cherry tomatoes. They often have a dozen kinds or more—red, yellow, orange, purple, and golden tomatoes—some sweeter, some more lemony, some meaty, fruity, herbaceous, or earthy.

I must tell you, there is a tomato-eating ecstasy (and it’s completely legal). My mouth explodes with sunlight, water, blue skies, patches of cloud. Birds call and insects hum. Earth, be it red, black, brown, or yellow dirt, has been distilled into flesh and seed, skin and juice. My body responds and comes alive. A smile breaks forth. I am home, a place wild and robust. If a tomato can be this fully a tomato, it must be OK for me to be fully me, with all my bugs and weeds and unexplored but fertile mud.

If a tomato is just a tomato, well then, you will never know this ecstasy, and somewhere inside will be unfulfilled appetites aching and yearning to be fed. Tomatoes with no discernable taste, pulpy pink water, will not satisfy this hunger for vigor and vitality. You can taste the difference.

All these tomatoes at Real Foods also have a "family" name, the place they come from, because that is also what or who they are: Knoll Farm, Full Belly Farm, Webb Ranch, Hungry Hollow, Terra Firma. When Kofi, a yoga teacher friend, came to dinner at our house, he said that when he grew up in Ghana they always knew where the fruits or vegetables were from, this hillside or that valley, and who grew them. It’s unavoidably part of the vegetable, part of the fruit. He said that even after years of living in the West he still couldn’t understand how we could eat anonymous produce so indiscriminately. Don’t we have any sense about these differences?

What is not "measurable" tends to be overlooked. What is distinctly human, distinctly individual, unique, alive, different tends to be unacknowledged, unvoiced. I say, let the tomatoes sing, let them dance, let them do cartwheels in your mouth, let them awaken your heart, your soul, your spirit. Let them speak sermons, soliloquies, and sonnets.

The truth is you're already a cook.
Nobody teaches you anything,
but you can be touched, you can be awakened.
Put down the book and start asking,
"What have we here?"

Though recipes abound, for soups and salads,
breads and entrées, for getting enlightened
and perfecting the moment, still
the unique flavor of Reality
appears in each breath, each bite,
each step, unbounded and undirected.

Each thing just as it is,
What do you make of it?

                 Edward Espe Brown