Tomato Tales: Summer’s Red Jewels in Poetry and Culinary Delight

July 9, 2020

Today's poems and musings pay tribute to one of summer’s most treasured gifts: the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum).

Ripened under hot July suns, their skin warm and taut, tomatoes are proof that the garden can taste like joy itself. Few sights please a gardener more than the vines heavy with fruit—their emerald leaves hiding scarlet, sun-filled rewards. And for cooks, poets, and dreamers alike, the tomato represents the very essence of summer’s abundance.

Chef Mario Batali captures that innocent thrill of first taste—that moment when all the waiting, watering, and worry transform into perfect flavor:

You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else.
— Mario Batali, American chef and writer

Every gardener knows this moment of reverence: that first tomato sliced on the counter, seeds glistening like jewels, its scent as sweet as the promise of summer fulfilled. It marks the turning point in the season from toil to reward.

Writer and humorist Lewis Grizzard keeps it simple and true, reminding us that eating a tomato—especially one grown by your own hands—seems to dissolve every trace of trouble:

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.
— Lewis Grizzard, American writer and humorist

Indeed, the tomato demands mindfulness.

Its flavor insists you stop and savor. No errand, deadline, or complaint can compete with its sun-warmed sweetness on a summer afternoon.

Then, from singer and gardener John Denver comes a hymn to the humble fruit that could easily serve as every gardener’s anthem. His playful ode captures the way tomatoes become shorthand for love, effort, and joy itself:

Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
What would life be like without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes.
— John Denver, American singer and songwriter, Home Grown Tomatoes

It’s barely a song about food at all—it’s a song about gratitude. The tomato, in Denver’s hands, becomes a way of saying that the simplest pleasures are the finest ones.

And finally, a wink of humor from animated television: a parody poem delightfully titled “They Were Delicious,” attributed to Walter Charles Walter and performed by Mr. Simmons in Hey, Arnold! It’s a loving send-up of William Carlos Williams’ minimalist verse, transforming temptation on the windowsill into comic confession:

I have eaten
the tomatoes,
that were on
the window sill

were you
saving
them for
a special occasion

I apologize
they were delicious
so juicy
so red
— Walter Charles Walter, They Were Delicious
From Hey Arnold by Craig Bartlett

It’s a perfect blend of summer mischief and poetic parody—a reminder that tomatoes, for all their sweetness, can inspire both art and appetite in equal measure. One almost forgives the thief for eating them.

In the end, each of these voices—chef, singer, poet, and animated teacher—celebrates the same truth: the tomato is summer incarnate.

Whether sliced with basil, tucked into paper sandwiches, or stolen from a sunlit sill, the tomato is more than food.

It’s the heart of July, round as the sun, red as joy, and fleeting as the perfect day in the garden.